7 The art of metrics: Tracking performance for organizational success
This chapter covers
- Understanding the value of metrics for an organization
- Identifying measures of success to use as metrics
- Designing SMART metrics for effective tracking and decision-making
- Identifying and mitigating common pitfalls and errors when creating metrics
- Powerfully communicating progress and insights to stakeholders
When watching or reading the news, you’ll regularly see charts tracking information over time. You may be familiar with many of them—stock market performance, the Air Quality Index (AQI), unemployment rate—and you likely understand what it means when the numbers increase or decrease. These metrics enable you to understand the world and how it changes.
Metrics are standardized quantitative measures that track processes, outcomes, or activities over time. These invaluable tools allow us to understand immediate and long-term changes that influence nearly every facet of our lives.
This chapter will cover the skills you need to create similarly clear, actionable, and effective metrics (without a century of work!). You will learn how to identify valuable processes to monitor, translate the process into a metric, avoid common pitfalls in metric calculations, and share them effectively with stakeholders. The metrics you design will enable your organization to understand the effect of their actions, make strategic decisions, and understand the complex processes that influence the organization.