What is the Big Deal with Metrics?

What are metrics? Metrics are the driving force behind key decisions that businesses must make to adapt to the ever-changing marketplace, in today’s modern business world.

For any business, success and survival sometimes depends on making critical decisions, which metrics can drive. From a newly opened startup to large corporate enterprises, the path to success is dependent on companies being knowledgeable and up-to-date on how their own business is performing.

Because business is constantly evolving, new metrics are being developed every day, while current ones are continuously being improved and updated. Developing and continuing to utilize and drive effective metrics is a key to telling leadership:

• Where the business has been
• Where the business is heading
• If important targets and goals are being met
• If there is an issue or process that needs to be addressed or fixed

Utilizing metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) helps team members and management discover operations in need of improvement, discuss how they may be improved upon, and convey this information to those in a position to affect progress in those areas.

Obstacles Companies Encounter Implementing New Metrics

From simple metric ideation to driving implementation, businesses face several challenges they must overcome in order to successfully and more effectively use metrics to make critical decisions affecting how they adopt to today’s ever-changing industries and marketplace.

There are many obstacles and challenges businesses face when trying to implement and drive new metrics. Here are some of the more prominent ones:

1. Developing Metrics That Are Too Complicated & Complex.One of the best things about Metrics is that you, as a company, get to design and implement them. To leverage & benefit from your metrics it is important to keep them as simple as possible. The more complicated they become they easier it becomes to stop measuring it. Employees and management need to be able to fundamentally understand the metrics and what they can do to directly influence its change and improvement.
2. Having a Clear Purpose Established for Each Metric. While having lots of metrics helps to measure things in different ways it is also important that businesses don’t get “Metric Happy”. Businesses want a successful balance in what metrics they track and measure, so they can still focus on achieving their goals and other opportunities.
3. Moving from Ideation to Implementation. One of the most difficult and challenging aspects of establishing new metrics, either brand new or improving existing ones, is moving from ideation to implementation.

Metrics: Are They That Important?

Metrics are a critical part of any business. With the correct processes and metrics in place, any business has the potential and opportunity to become successful.

Metrics make processes measurable. When processes are designed they are built to meet specific customer demands. Metrics help to measure the sometimes “vague” customer requirements by using numbers that can be utilized to measure the efficiency of the process.

Improvement Goals are communicated and measured though the use of metrics.Metrics play a vital role in eliminating any personal opinions or biases of progress and improvements that have been made.

Metrics help drive the feedback loop to management & supervisors in a position to affect change.What is being measured, ultimately, gets managed. Once benchmarks and goals are determined, it can be measured against metrics that are studied and analyzed at daily, weekly, or monthly intervals. As a result, metrics are the foundation for control and incremental change in any business.

Ensuring Implementation and Buy-In: CGN Framework and Approach:

For any business, implementing and establishing new metrics can seem like a daunting and challenging task. Typically, to succeed and to ensure long term sustainability, a business must have a detailed approach and plan for execution. At CGN Global, we have dedicated teams that work and collaborate directly with management to ensure alignment and assist our clients in achieving their future state goals.