There’s a family quote that says, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” So how do you know what to measure for a deal process? It is different than what you would do in a manufacturing environment where you have specific defect metrics. In order to deal process, metrics should relate to customer needs.

In step 2 (creating the foundation) of the 10 steps to business process improvement, you develop basic information about the business process. A key area included in the foundation is the measures of success. After identifying your customer (or customer) and what they need from the process, you should also describe how you will know if you meet what they need. At this point, just write a sentence that describes what you want to measure. Don’t worry in this step as you will measure something, just identify what you want to measure. For example, a sales manager may describe a measure of success as “increased number of new customers.”

Since you, or the project team, are simply describing general information about the process in step 2, it will be fairly easy for you to define the what. If you have trouble writing the statements, ask questions like “What does success look like?” “How will you know when you will be successful?” As you create the measurements, think about effective efficiency, Y adaptability and try writing measurements that fall into each of these three areas.

Step 7 is where you spend some time thinking about as to convert your overall measures of success into specific metrics. By the time you get to this step, you will have drawn the process map (step 3), identified how long the process takes from start to finish (step 4), validated your information (step 5), and applied a series of techniques to improve the process (step 6), so that you are well positioned to tackle the metrics challenge.

Measuring the success of the sales manager may initially seem like a efficiency metric, because it seems to focus on volume, but if the sales manager also cares about the quality of new clients to which it could belong effectiveness And read something like, “30 percent increase in the number of new qualified customers over the next six months.” Notice how much more specific the metric is, than it appeared in step 2. However, if you had spent the time in step 2 to get to this level of detail, you would have found yourself drowning in too much unnecessary information too early in the process. .

In step 7, you must also determine how you will deliver the metric. You may need to create a new tracking method, establish baseline information, or develop a new report. In step 8 (test), make sure that any new report meets the needs of the stakeholders by displaying a standard version.

In step 10 (continuous improvement), decide how often you plan to review the measurement data. Will you do this weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually?

Lastly, remember that you can’t measure everything! Albert Einstein says: “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” So, use the needs of your customers as a source for what you measure. Include the most important effectiveness, efficiency, and adaptability metrics to get started.

Copyright 2010 Susan Page