There’s a familiar quote that says, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” So how do you know what to measure for a business process? It’s different than what you would do in a manufacturing environment where you have specific defect metrics. For business process, metrics should be related 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 database is the measures of success. After you’ve identified your customer (or client) and what they need from the process, you also need to describe how you’ll know if you’re meeting their needs. At this point, simply write a sentence that describes what you want to measure. Don’t worry about this step. as you are going to measure something, just identify that you want to measure For example, a sales manager might 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 should be fairly easy for you to define the process. that. If you have trouble writing the statements, ask questions like “What does success look like?” “How will you know when you are successful?” As you create the measurements, think about effective efficiency, and adaptability and try to write measurements that fall into each of these three areas.

Step 7 is where you spend some time thinking about as to turn your general measures of success into specific metrics. By the time you get to this step, you 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 number of techniques to improve the process ( step 6), so you are well positioned to meet the metrics challenge.

The sales manager’s measure of success 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 customers could actually fall under effectiveness and it reads 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 what 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 buried in too much unnecessary information too early in the process.

In step 7, you also need to determine how you will deliver the metric. You may need to create a new tracking method, set baseline information, or develop a new report. In step 8 (testing), ensure that any new report meets stakeholder needs by displaying a repeating 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?

Finally, 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.” Therefore, use the needs of your customers as the source of what you measure. Include the most important metrics for effectiveness, efficiency, and adaptability to get you started.

Copyright 2010 Susan Page