Objective Metrics

As a matter of practice, I love metrics and measuring how we are doing. It is great to put in an improvement initiative and see the results.

Metrics and measures, though, should be objective. I remember the old quote, “statistics do not lie, just the people who use them.” This is true with our metrics, too. They are manipulated to meet an agenda. We have all seen this up close.

As an industry, we do not talk enough about leading and lagging indicators. These are metrics that either give us an indication of what will happen or what has happened.

Today, I want to focus on leading indicators. As a leader, you should be trying to identify these and use them in your decision-making process.

Some examples of leading indicators are:
1). Opportunities/RFS/Project requests – > indicating the future business needs and outcomes. Should use to align resources.
2). New Assets/CIs found through discovery -> indicating that the onboarding of Assets/CIs is not working
3). Number of Emergency Changes -> indicating something may be off with Change approval process, whether not assessing well or not approving fast enough that non-urgent Changes are now urgent.