Now that
you’re actively collecting data and making measurements and attempting to
improve your business, how do you go about reporting your progress? This is one
of the most difficult decisions that business owners and manager have to make. What
do we report, how should it look, how often should we update, and who’s going
to do all this updating in the first place?
First,
start with the most important measures for the unit being measured. That is, if
you’re measuring your customer service department, then decide what are the few
important measures on which we should concentrate for that department. If you’re
preparing a reporting mechanism for the board of directors, then you’re going
to look at the whole company.
You can
only concentrate on a handful of measures at one time, so pick the three to six
most important ones for the area in which you’re working and go from there. As
you make improvements to one area, you can substitute another area that has become
a bigger problem. As you get better at working with these data points and
trends, you can add more measures.
One way to
display the information is in the form of a dashboard. Just like in a vehicle,
you have a dashboard with the few important data points that you need to
successfully “manage” your transportation system. You don’t want to get a
ticket for speeding, so you have a speedometer. You don’t want to run out of
gas, so you have a gas gage. There are other gages on your dashboard showing
the status of various systems in your vehicle. Some are gages, some only tell
you when you have a problem, like the check engine light. And unless you’re Penny,
when that light comes on, you need to check your engine. If the light is off,
you can assume you’re engine is operating fine. Together, these different
measurement systems indicate the status of your transportation system. And the
real beauty of a dashboard is you can see it and understand the status of your
system in just a glimpse. Similarly, your company dashboard needs to be
arranged to use different types of gages so that it’s logical and displays the
whole system status quickly.
Here’s an
example of a corporate dashboard from computer networking company F1 Solutions,
here in Huntsville. F1 ownership and management decided what was really
important to measure and set their tech staff at programming the measures into
an automatically updating system that displays their performance relating to
response times and customer service.
Unless you’ve
got a talented tech staff, you probably won’t be able to create a fancy
dashboard like F1. You don’t need to either. For a bunch of tech guys, this is
a problem that needed to be solved. You probably don’t have resources like this
available at your company. What you need to figure out is how to display the
information in a meaningful way that allows you to properly manage your systems
with the least amount updating.
If you need
help with your measurement systems, give us a call.
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