Are you chasing the right goals?

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What gets measured gets managed. You would have heard this several times. There is so much focus on measuring and reporting all data that is easily available. This leads to information overload. Colorful charts on the projector screen scream for attention. Quite often, teams waste energy and time on meaningless reports. What are you monitoring? What are your goals? Are you chasing the right goals?

Do you measure the spread of data?

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Performance reports and dashboards often report the average values. When measured alone, averages tend to lie. Understanding the variation along with the average performance and addressing the root causes for variation will help you better conform to customer expectations.

What are your actionable metrics?

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“For a report to be actionable, it must demonstrate clear cause and effect”. Eric Ries made this argument in his bestselling book “The Lean Startup”. He is right to stress on the importance of monitoring actionable metrics. Quite often we get into the trap of vanity metrics. Either these vanity metrics look good or the data is easily available. However, as the name suggests, these do not lead to any action as cause and effect are not established. Have you identified actionable metrics for your business? What metrics do you monitor?