How Do You Measure Success?
January 12th, 2009 by Debra PaynterI had decided on the title “How Do You Measure Success” when brainstorming blog topics and had planned to do a post about KPI’s. It’s definitely a hot topic and before I even had started Brian Gallagher beat me to the punch with his post “A Recipe for Disaster – KPIs without a Measurement Strategy“. So I took the few tidbits I had prepared and added them to his post (good team work huh?). Of course now I can focus on what interests me even more – the answer to the title question.
I love the question, “How Do You Measure Success”. It is the very first question I ask my clients when I start working with them. How do they measure success, how does their company, department or the various teams within their organization measure success? Those answers provide the base that I use to build their metrics upon. It is common to hear, “more traffic”, “increased revenue” and “customer engagement” as some of the answers. Each gives us a place to start and we can go from there.
As a consultant it’s just as important for me to ask myself the same question as I start each new project, which I share at my initial meeting with the client. For me the measure of success as a consultant is when my actions, recommendations, support and expertise leads to a measure of success for my client. I want my answer to help set the bar for our working relationship because if I am not helping them to increase their ability to be successful then I am not living up to my own expectations.
I believe that when you are measuring for success you are setting yourself up to win. This is one of the reasons I had decided the question “How Do You Measure Success” would be a good title for a post about KPI’s, because KPI’s are just that – measurements used to quantify success. Success of course is the most positive measurement of results and that’s what executives, management and team leaders are looking for – results.
This is a great question to ask the various business users during the Business Requirements Gathering phase. The key point in analytics isn’t gathering the data. The key point of analytics is how we use the data we collected to make decisions. Nearly every analyst I speak with at one time during a conversation about analytics will make a point about wanting their business users to actually use the data to drive their decisions. Analysts don’t see the production of reports as a measurement of our success.
I’m going to be asking more people to answer that same question – my coworkers, WebTrends customers, business contacts and other people within the industry. This will be a regular topic/on-going series and I look forward to sharing their responses with you. Of course you can join in right now and share your answer with us “How Do You Measure Success?”
Tags: goals, Key Performance Indicators, KPI, measure, measurement, success
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January 12th, 2009 at 7:45 am
Yes, that’s THE question, and as you say the answer is usually pretty broad, just a starting point.
The NEXT question is, for me, a lot more difficult. The conversation usually branches after the first question, into 1) “Okay, but what does that mean?” or 2) “Well, aside from that, what kinds of things indicate partial success, or probable future success?” Getting people to operationalize, i.e. turn their generalities into specifics that are fairly finite and objective, is very challenging and requires a really experienced person in the room (hopefully the metrics person). Often, these “define success” working sessions for site analytics are the first time that the people in the room have actually had to work through, in their own minds, what they are after and how they’ll know it when the see it. Seriously. It’s amazing how people can do their jobs without operationalizing their goals, but they do it every day, all day.
One reason I like being in analytics is because the metrics person is often the one who pushes others to do this kind of mental exercise. In fact, I’ve seen metrics people labeled as “pests” about it … eventually accompanied by “that session was hard but it was incredibly helpful and productive.” It’s pretty neat when, in one of these sessions, we reach a point where the operationalized objectives start to easily turn into actions … “we need to do more of such and such because it’s clearly related to an important objective” … “we have to think about whether we should be doing such and such because its relationship to the objectives is really pretty thin; coolness isn’t enough.”
I really dislike multi-syllabic jargon but “operationalize” is one to keep.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Love the term “operationalize” Chris. Thanks for your excellent post. The metric folks DO push and it IS a mental exercise for the rest of the team and in the end I usually do hear back that it was exhausting but worth it.
I like to start with a question of success as the base measurement to get the team focused on the end goal which no matter what the key measures are, results is what we are all looking for. I want to push them past thinking the report itself is the result because reports are only a deliverable.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:30 am
So true!