How should you use Scorecard and KPIs within your weekly management and department meetings?
I ask you all to envision an exceptional week in each of the major functions of your business. Sales, Marketing, Operations, Finance, Administration
“What happened during the week to make this week an exception week?”
Just as an example, thinking about the Operations (dev tech team) in my software company. We came up with things like
- Resolved a ton of support tickets without incident
- Not a lot of time on the phone, knocked out a ton of dev time instead
- Was super accurate on my time estimates
- I didn’t get interrupted in the middle of development by having to go to some useless meeting!
- Used a new technique that will help me be a much better developer in the future.
- The sales team came to us with a great idea to build on from one of our big clients that we didn’t think about. Excited to get to work on that idea.
- We were organized and not running to put out fires
- We created something cool
- Didn’t get yelled at by anyone about a screw up
- Could rely on teammates
Ideally, answers like these should come pouring out of your heads because each item listed is key to having a great week in your company and department. Much of these things can be measured, sometimes in an automated system and sometimes by hand in an old fashioned Excel or Google sheet. The scorecard metrics you develop will start to be precursors to establishing goals for the week in advance for each measured activity and then be able to track progress of are you on-track or off-track on the most needed things you and your people do. You will be able to respond quickly to off-track items to get back on-track and also able to recognize when things you do are on-track consistently to see where you excel.
Examples of scorecard metrics that came out of that conversation
- How many support tickets resolved
- Avg call time
- # Bugs reported
- # Internal training hours
- Avg Response time
- % estimate accuracy vs reality
- # Product Dev hours (enhancements)
- # Internal Meeting hours
- # of Rush support items (Fires to put out)
3 Valuable outcomes of weekly measurements:
- You as the leadership team and all of your people in the company will have a strong pulse on performance. They can act quickly if something is off-track.
- You all will be able to better predict longer and longer term operational and financial performance based on these metric trends
- They will build a higher level of accountability among the people who are running the day to day activities
Also, really lean in and think about building your scorecard around your team including their input.
To get a high level of ownership of the scorecard, it is important to ask your team and think yourself what are the activities or things that happen on a daily through weekly basis that leads to an exceptional week of work. This approach will produce a high level of ownership and empowerment for your people which leads to natural accountability for something they were involved in building
Think on this:
“If you leave the office on Friday afternoon, drive home, and with a huge smile on your face say to your family as you walk in the door, ‘I just had the most fantastic, wonderful week!’ — What would have happened that week to cause that reaction?”
Once you all get in a cycle of weekly metrics those easily roll into monthly metrics into quarterly metrics into 1 year, and into your 3 year plan. There are 13 weeks in a quarter, there are 4 quarters in a year, there are 3 years in your 3 year plan.
If you your whole company hit the scorecard metrics of the most important activities and things to do each and every week, how much better would your company be? How much closer to your goals would you be? How much better a work environment would you have helped create for everyone that works in your company? This is when you truly will be gaining traction in your company and high levels of success will follow
-David Case
Chief Operating Officer/ Senior Business Advisor
Adatasol, Inc.
Making Businesses Better Through Software Solutions