How to Engage in Realistic Measurement Viewpoints

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar entitled, "Infrastructure Optimization Scorecards” hosted by InetSoft. The speaker is Jessica Little, Marketing Manager at InetSoft.

There are many different viewpoints. Measurement is one of the viewpoints you have to have. Other ones include how to get people involved and not just the governance of those three or four level executives in the organization. How do you permeate that? How do you get it to action? How do you track that?

That’s what I’ve been trying to do. You create spreadsheets and these PowerPoint’s, and then you go off and go “bye, I’m leaving. I’ve been here for four months, and I created a plan, left it on the desk of the guy whose team is supposed to track it.”

Then they go, “you have 20 projects. It’s going to take four years.” You had the goals laid out, the questions, the metrics, and indicators of when things will go by, but you didn’t give us any business intelligence tools. That’s not a good system.

Then at another pretty good company, they say, okay, let’s try to look at performance management tools and see where things are. That’s how I really got into finding performance stuff. That’s how I found out that performance metrics are real good at a high level in a dashboarding system because it puts it in the terms of what the executives said, and then we would get started on the design.

The design happened to be putting in these things called repositories. They have all these nice dashboarding tools, and we write these nice neat templates for them, but they are not linked. Now we have a new gap.

Using the Performance Scorecard

We have the strategy of using the performance scorecard, and we have all these things that are part of the design, including rules about how the design should evolve. I want to encourage people to become more innovative.  

So I said, we’re going to call this innovation a strategic transformation action repository. I could hardly remember what it stood for, but they liked the idea, especially the senior management.  They wanted to know who was responsible for it.

In other places, the executives like to know who the project manager is. They loved the idea of hooking this performance stuff at the top to a repository and finding out who was available in addition to the fact that you could email them. This is the dream for the micromanager.

As you enter this transformation phase, you’ve already done the planning, so I go out there for three or four months and talk to all these people and drop the transformation plan. That’s not what I’m trying to do. 

Another client of mine does a yearly review. If they didn’t have a good year, and I am assisting in where the planning went wrong, I need to find a better approach. You need to have a way to listen and be proactively engaged with people. You need to engage people in the organization and the measurements have to an effect on somebody making a change in behavior or else we’d be expecting magic. Magic happens only where the Bellagio is, in one of the rooms the magicians are in.