Using metrics to improve the software or web design performance, marketing, and sales is a standard operating procedure for many companies. Still, many other areas can be enhanced using metrics, such as personal goals, team performance standards, and building maintenance. Before you start collecting data and generating reports, you will determine what you need to track, where you want improvements made, and what those improvements will look like.
Understand What To Track
The first step in effectively using metrics is understanding which ones to track to achieve your goals. For instance, it is one thing to know that Prometheus metrics track counters, summaries, gauges, and histograms, but an entirely different one to know which metrics will tell you how many errors there were in a given timeframe. If you want a count of mistakes, you will use a counter metric. You will want to track call times to know how long customer service calls last on average. Choosing your metrics based on broad categories of improvement is the best way to narrow down the specific Key Performance Indicators, KPIs, that you should focus on.
Set Key Performance Indicators
Once you know what to track, you will want to know how to quantify the data to measure progress toward goals. Knowing that you sold a hundred units last month does not help you determine performance unless you know your average highs and lows for monthly sales. A hundred units sold compared to a couple of dozen sales on average is much better than that same hundred units compared to an average sales number in the thousands. Once you have set your key performance indicators, you can form actionable goals and measure their results against your metrics. Your KPIs will also help your team create benchmarks along the pathways to various goals and know where individual improvements can be made.
Automate Tracking and Reports
Tracking metrics and generating reports are tedious processes that can waste time you can spend doing something to boost those numbers. Automating the processes can save you time and help avoid mistakes. Fortunately, many machine learning and AI options are on the market to help you automate your data processes, including collection and report generation. You can even use many of the same AIs to predict future trends based on those metrics and your current reports.
Provide Visibility To the Team
One of the worst things you can do when using metrics to improve your business is to avoid transparency and visibility with your team. This will erode trust and impact cooperation. Instead, loop as many team members as possible into the planning and goal-making process, take input on which metrics your teammates think need to be tracked, and work together to earn incentives. Any metrics not containing sensitive data can be displayed on a team dashboard to help inspire better work performance and investment.
Evaluate KPIs Regularly
It is a good idea to reevaluate your KPIs regularly, even if you have not met your goals, especially if you are not consistently meeting benchmarks. Sometimes tracking a metric for the first month of a new project is a good idea, but monitoring it once the team has a working rhythm for the tasks is a waste of time. Other times, the metric’s value or the numbers’ validity causes more debate than the reports’ worth. Evaluating the data you collect and report on regularly is beneficial to weed out inconsequential information and pull in more valuable data. Eliminating data clutter can also help streamline your meetings and allow you to get more collaboration done.
Using metrics effectively means determining where your challenges are and which numbers you should track to pinpoint problems or set improvement goals. You will then want to determine what specific metrics should be tracked, what success looks like for each purpose and how to get the whole team on board. It is critical to reevaluate your goals, metrics and KPIs regularly to keep the data you collect working for you.
