Connecting strategy and metrics - why, and how - dashboard quality

Did a talk this morning at Minnesota Manufacturing Group - the "7 Mistakes" talk from July, slightly revised.

Tremendously experienced and sharp group, asked some great questions - like how to measure and find the discipline of execution. like how to keep strategic plans from being perceived as "same old, same old," like the time horizon of long-term plans, like how to optimize ownership and accountability at the right levels.  Reflecting on the answers will take several blogs!

Some organizations do carry their strategic plans over from year to year.  If it's working, that's great.  But the question is how do you know it's working, and that gets to metrics.

A strategy without a dashboard is almost useless - and creating the dashboard is where the first hard work comes in.  There should only be a few metrics, since humans can focus on a few things, especially for a prolonged period of time.

And if there's only a few, then they'd better be good ones!

What makes good dashboard metrics? 

They're forward-looking.  On sales, for instance, you need good information about what's in the funnel (or pipeline) several months out, with appropriately cautious metrics that there won't be many surprises.

They're timely.  On customer satisfaction or employee experience, an annual survey is too long to wait to find out if there's a problem!  Better to have smaller samplings more often to keep a finger on the pulse so that corrections can be made when needed.

They measure what matters, rather than what's easy or traditional to measure.  When a call center realized what pressuring to reduce time-on-call meant for customer satisfaction (strong negative correlation), they switched to randomly sampling customer satisfaction, without pressuring agents to get off the phone quickly.

They're trustworthy.  The old adage of "garbage in, garbage out" is as true today as when the phrase was first used in the 70's - you can't make good decisions on bad data.  If a key data source is compromised, leaders need to clean it up or find other data to inform the same objective.

They're strategically consistent.  One person from Minnesota Manufacturing Group told the story of an organization he knew that measured salespeople on gross revenue, and production on cost-savings.  Can you guess what these competing metrics created?

Next strategy blog - how to avoid "same old same old"