IT Metrics: Feast or Famine - What to Do About It

Measurement is all about progress; it must be treated as an ongoing process.  However, to break the feast or famine cycle it can help to take a step back and rebalance. 

Ideas for reining in the Metrics Feast:

1.    Stop. Simply stop producing one of the metrics reports.  See who yells (if anyone).

2.    Ask why. Question the items in the list by asking “What do we do when we look at this report?”  If the answer is “nothing,” take it off the menu.

3.    Look at a “day in the life.”  Ask a key constituent who is a heavy consumer of metrics to collaborate on a pilot project and pick the top 5 or 10 metrics that represent a “day in the life” of their work, responsibilities, and concerns.  For the COO, those metrics might include earned value of IT projects, benefits achieved, or service levels.  For the CEO, the most important metrics might be around transformation progress or discretionary vs. strategic IT spending. Pilot a report on just those few top-priority metrics for 2 months and then assess the impact on that individual and on the team producing the report.  Chances are you’ll create less work and more insightful information for both of you.

4.    Simplify.  Stop making the executives’ jobs harder by diluting useful information with other non-critical data.  Think of the challenge as “how can I design a 1-page dashboard for the CxO?” 

Here are some ideas for feeding actionable information to an organization suffering from a  Metrics Famine. The approach you take will depend a lot on who you are trying to influence and your relationship. 

1.    Create a disciple. Start with a key project already underway that is important to a particular business function and ask them to pick three key performance indicators worth measuring from the final business case. Carefully explain to the business sponsor how and why your team will be monitoring those factors for the duration of the project and for three months after the project is completed.  Then in the course of regular project updates, consistently refer to those metrics to demonstrate such things as project status, or variance against plan. If you can convert an influential skeptic by getting him or her involved in the process upfront you’ll improve your chances of building a groundswell of support.   

2.    Show, don't tell. Put yourself in the shoes of the CFO or one of the Business Unit Heads and ask the question:  “What metric(s) would I want IT to bring to my office every month?”   Track those metrics manually for 3 months to learn more about the effort required, their validity, and the best of ways of presenting the data. If you think what you’ve learned can stand up to the scrutiny, share your findings in a “what if” conversation that can help your constituent clearly see the value that metrics can deliver.  

3.    Track it. Expose it. Identify a fundamentally inefficient behavior that you are trying to change.  Develop metrics around that behavior so you can make a fact-based case that will persuade people to change it. Is your IT department spending too much time in unproductive meetings and not enough on delivering discretionary, value-added projects?  Track the behavior and let your findings see the light of day. Public transparency breeds peer pressure, competition, and ultimately better behavior.

4.    Hold people accountable.  Change the culture so that people must have metrics, goals, and action plans to improve those metrics.  The improvement plan should be focused on hard dollars. It could be focused on an uptick in customer retention percentage or customer happiness, or it could simply be in satisfying a regulatory or missing control (Yes or No can sometimes suffice).

Conclusion

A favorite definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. But you need to measure to change that kind of behavior.   Get a metrics plan in place for a few months and get yourself out of the insanity of the metrics feast or famine.

Jim Quick is a Partner with Diamond Management & Technology Consultants.