“What’s in your Scorecard?” Scorecards are a fundamental part of measuring performance and guiding activities and decision-making across an organization to drive business value. Your scorecard should tell a story and provide a framework for measuring your success. Before building a scorecard, though, you first need to challenge yourself: what is your definition of success? What requirement is your team responding to? Each company has a Vision Statement for the value they plan to bring to the world. Their contributions make a positive difference and drive success for their customers, stakeholders, and themselves. A successful business will use metrics to measure the impact of their efforts aligned to the goals for the organization. Focusing on IT is our responsibility.
We provide a service to our organization and, in the world we live in today, that service impacts directly or indirectly the experience of our customers and stakeholders.
When you look at your goals and measure your team according to your definition of success, what metrics are you looking at? Is it mean time to repair (MTTR) for tickets? Is it goal completion for your team roadmap? Can you relate your efforts to revenue for the business? At some level, your team does impact revenue. Work these metrics into a scorecard and then identify how to report on those metrics.
If it’s MTTR, where are you tracking your trouble cases? Are you relating your uptime versus the cost of downtime? Do you know the direct or indirect cost to your business for each minute of service downtime for application and network availability? Can you connect these metrics to customer satisfaction and attrition or employee satisfaction and attrition?
Now that you can see these metrics think about the tools you are using to collect this information. Think about the strategy you use to derive conclusions from the data pulled into your tools?
In the end, you should have a series of metrics that you report on weekly. The trends derived from those metrics should be numbers you can evaluate to ensure your team is organized and continues to deliver measurable value to your organization.
And, as you review these numbers, you and your team should be challenging your activities to ensure you are on track to achieve your goals and deliver on your commitments to the business and your customers.