Measuring Success

Measuring success is an essential part of any business or organisation. Without proper measurement, it can be challenging to determine whether your efforts are having the desired impact and whether you are moving towards achieving your goals.

Here are some tips for measuring success:

1.      Define clear and specific goals: Before measuring success, you must first define what success looks like. This means setting clear and specific goals that are aligned with your organisation's mission and vision.

2.      Identify key performance indicators (KPIs): KPIs are metrics that you use to track progress towards your goals. Identify the KPIs that are most relevant to your goals and use them to track progress.

3.      Set benchmarks: To determine whether you are making progress towards your goals, set benchmarks that represent your desired outcomes. This will allow you to track progress over time and make adjustments as necessary.

4.      Use data: Use data to measure success. Collect data from relevant sources, such as customer feedback, sales figures, and website analytics. Analyse the data to determine whether you are making progress towards your goals.

5.     Review and adjust: Review your progress regularly and make adjustments as necessary. Use the data you collect to identify areas where you need to improve and make changes to your strategies and tactics.

Why is measuring success important?

Measuring success is important for several reasons:

1.      Helps track progress: Measuring success enables you to track your progress towards your goals. It helps you to identify what is working and what isn't, so you can adjust your strategies and tactics as needed to stay on track.

2.      Provides clarity and focus: When you measure success, you have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and how you plan to get there. This clarity and focus help you stay motivated and committed to achieving your goals.

3. Enables data-driven decision making:Measuring success allows you to make data-driven decisions based on objective metrics rather than intuition or guesswork. This approach enables you to make 1.      more informed decisions and reduces the risk of making costly mistakes.

4.     Facilitates accountability: Measuring success provides a framework for accountability. It allows you to establish clear expectations for performance and hold yourself and your team accountable for achieving your goals.

5.     Encourages continuous improvement: Measuring success encourages continuous improvement by enabling you to identify areas for improvement and track progress towards making those improvements. This approach fosters a culture of learning and growth within your organisation.

Overall, measuring success is essential for achieving your goals and driving growth and success in your organisation. By tracking progress, providing clarity and focus, enabling data-driven decision making, facilitating accountability, and encouraging continuous improvement, measuring success helps you to maximise your potential and achieve your objectives.

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If we can help you, reach out for a no obligation chat to Jo Hands on 0459826221, or jo.hands@whiteark.com.au

Article by Jo Hands, Whiteark Founder

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OKR Approach

OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is an approach to goal-setting that helps organisations align their efforts and focus on what truly matters.

Here's an overview of the OKR approach:

1.      Objectives: Objectives are specific and measurable goals that the organisation wants to achieve. They should be aligned with the organisation's mission and vision and be challenging but achievable.

2.      Key Results: Key Results are the specific metrics used to measure progress towards achieving the objectives. They should be quantitative and measurable and should indicate whether or not the objective has been achieved.

3.      Alignment: OKRs are cascaded throughout the organisation to ensure alignment and focus. Each department, team, and individual should have their own set of OKRs that are aligned with the overall organisational goals.

4.       Regular check-ins: Regular check-ins are conducted to monitor progress and make adjustments as necessary. This helps ensure that the organisation stays on track and can adapt to changes in the business environment.

5.      Continuous improvement: OKRs are not set in stone and should be reviewed and revised regularly. This allows the organisation to adapt to changes and continuously improve its performance.

The OKR approach is used by many successful organisations, including Google, Intel, and LinkedIn. By setting clear and measurable goals, aligning efforts, and regularly monitoring progress, organisations can focus their efforts and achieve their most important objectives.

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If we can help you, reach out for a no obligation chat to Jo Hands on 0459826221, or jo.hands@whiteark.com.au

Article by Jo Hands, Whiteark Founder

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The Importance of Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement refers to the process of defining, analyzing, and improving business processes to increase overall quality, while removing as many waste activities as possible.

“Article by Jo Hands, Whiteark Co-Founder & Director”

There are three types of waste in Lean:

1. Muda

The major process wastes including, transport, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, over-processing and defects.

2. Mura

The waste of unevenness or inconsistency in your process. It stops your tasks from flowing smoothly across your work process and therefore gets in your way of reaching continuous flow.

3. Muri

The waste of overburden, when you assign too much work to your team, you place unnecessary stress on both your team and process.

If you want continuous improvement to become part of your culture, you need to focus on getting rid of the unevenness/inconsistency wastes (Mura) and overburden wastes (Muri) first. Eliminating all major process wastes (Muda) is almost impossible but focusing on reducing their adverse impacts on your work is key for implementing continuous improvement.

Companies should consider having a funding model for Continuous Improvement initiatives - making changes to processes to increase their profit, improve employee satisfaction, and accelerate productivity and efficiencies. Most often, business budgets do not include an allocation for continuous improvement – and a large amount of money is not required to make a substantial impact. Organisations should create a continuous improvement culture and encourage their people to look for opportunities to improve processes across the business and where the identified opportunities,

1. Align to the company’s strategic priorities/strategic direction and;

2. Size up to have biggest impact

There should be a funding model to support these initiatives. To execute on a continuous improvement process, benefits should be associated.

Below is a simple, common model that is used for Continuous Improvement, referred to as the Deming Circle – Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA). This model is a never-ending cycle that aims to help companies improve further based on achieved results.

Phase1 – Plan:

Define the objectives and processes required to achieve the desired goal. Setting output expectations is critical to achieving continuous improvement, as the precision of the goals and their completeness is a fundamental component of the process of improving.

Phase2 – Do:

Apply all that has been considered in the Planning phase. Expect that unpredicted problems may occur, which is why, if it is possible, you should test your plan on a small scale and in a controlled environment. Standardisation will assist with applying the plan smoothly – clear roles and responsibilities are essential.

Phase3 – Check:

Audit your plan’s execution “Do” phase and assess if your objectives and processes and goals from the “Plan” phase worked. To avoid recurring mistakes or if the team identified problems with the process that need to be eliminated in the future you need to undertake a root-cause analysis.

Phase4 – Act:

You developed, applied, and assessed your plan, now you need to act. If everything in “Do” worked well and you were able to achieve the original goals, then you can proceed and apply your initial plan. Your PDCA model will become the new baseline.

The benefits of the PDCAs model, includes: helping your team identify and test solutions and improve them through a waste-reducing cycle, stimulates continuous improvement culture (people and processes), allows your team to test possible solutions on a small scale and in a controlled environment, and prevents the work process from recurring mistakes.

Companies are looking for ways to increase their quality and reduce their costs which is why process improvement has become so important in today’s operating environment for the following reasons: customers have higher quality expectations, strong competition within the market and an unpredictable economic environment.

Whiteark has the expertise to help you with your continuous improvement needs, if this is something your business would like to explore, please reach out to Whiteark for a no obligation consultation.

Measuring transformation success

We know it’s cliché, but “what gets measured, gets managed”. A transformation program is undertaken to enhance an organisations performance and boost its health; it is fundamental to the success of your transformation that you measure your progress along the way.

The following checklist can be used as a guide for measuring the success of your transformation program:

Define Success

Agree on what success is for your transformation program. This is something you would have agreed early in the strategic planning phase.

KPI Scorecard

Define the key metrics that are crucial to evaluating the transformation’s success and build a scorecard. Use a combination of lead and lag indicators and qualitative and quantitative metrics.

Baseline

It is fundamental that you have a baseline for all your metrics prior to commencing your transformation program. This will allow you to understand the true impact the transformation is having on your organisation. You need to be able to see the movement on your scorecard.

Pivot

Incorporating leading indicators will help detect any challenges or risks early on and allow you to pivot in order to influence a more positive result for your transformation’s success.

Frequency

It is critical that your scorecard is refreshed at a reasonable frequency to monitor the movement relative to the effort/changes being executed.

Need to curate your own transformation checklist, specific to your business needs? Let us help.

Whiteark is not your average consulting firm, we have first-hand experience in delivering transformation programs for private equity and other organisations. Focused on delivering both commercial and financial outcomes. 

We understand that execution is the hardest part, and so we roll our sleeves up and work with you to ensure we can deliver the required outcomes for the business. Our co-founders have a combined experience of over 50 years’ working as Executives in organisations delivering outcomes for shareholders. Reach out for a no obligation conversation on how we can help you. Contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au

What gets measured gets done

If it’s not part of your KPIs it’s probably not worth measuring. Most of us have heard the phrase ‘what measures gets done’. Sounds simple right? But when it comes to measuring what matters, it gets a bit tricker.

There are many organisations that aren’t clear on what they should be measuring. An easy way to address this is by using my KPI scorecard – see the breakdown below.

Alignment to strategy

Ensure the metrics being measured align with your organisation’s strategy.  For example, if you’re measuring organic traffic to your website but your strategy is all about driving leads via performance advertising, then this should be your first focus. Every KPI should have a measurable lead indicator. Sure, you can measure outside of this, but put your KPI measurements first and ensure they are adequately resourced before looking at anything else.

Set targets

For each of the key metrics, set targets that are a stretch by achievable.  These targets should align to a financial year; end of year target and monthly profile to deliver the end of year metric. 

Look at your baseline for last fin year and then consider the environment you’re operating in now and what kind of % increase you think can realistically be achieved. Talk to the relevant experts in the business and ask them to help form a plausible growth scenario. 

Regular measurement

When selecting what data outputs you’ll be measuring, get picky.

There should be no more than 20 key metrics that a business reviews and measures each week. For metrics that aren’t performing; a detailed plan should be prepared for the next month to get the metric back on track.

Refresh your metrics

Sticking to the same strategy all year isn’t always realistic. The beauty of measuring strategic outcomes each month allows for real time business decisions. This informed angle, means you can confidently pivot when necessary. If this is the case, update your metrics to align with these changes. And don’t forget to clearly document these changes and communicate them to the wider team. Especially those who are managing measurement.

Top Tip

It’s important to note; while financial metrics are critical, non-financial metrics are also key drivers, working to align the overall vision and values of the organisation.

Stop your reporting

Once you’ve sorted your KPI scorecard, it’s time to take a step back. Most organisations have so much reporting that it doesn’t get reviewed or given the attention needed to make it valuable. This is a common problem and can also make the task of analysing data end up in the ‘too hard basket’.

So stop. Now that you have a clear idea of what you should be focussing on, everything else is just clutter. Put in place one weekly dashboard of the top 20 metrics that align to the business objectives.  Provide performance and commentary for how each of the metrics are tracking. If you have a clear view on these, you’re much better off than measuring more but not reporting accurately. 

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Need a starting point?

Whiteark can help. We have a network of experts with practical experience implementing metrics measurements that matter to organisations.

Whether it’s advice or hands-on assistance, the Whiteark team are your go-to for valuable data analysis.  Contact whiteark@whiteark.com.au or call +61 459 826 221 to discuss.

Trees that deliver outcomes

Driver trees help support growth and demonstrate how each business function can contribute to success.

It’s possible I am showing my age with this article, but I love driver trees!

Also known as KPI trees, every time I go into a business I build myself one of these. It helps to support growth and demonstrate how each business function can contribute to the success of the business.

Here’s a rundown.

What can a driver tree deliver?

Understanding the key drivers in the business results in the following benefits:

• A better P&L result

• A clear view of the metrics you need to measure

• Visibility of where material value is derived

• Understanding the sensitivity a lever movement has on P&L result.

• Executing strategy and helping you prioritise

When building a driver tree, my advice is simple:

Don’t overcomplicate things – just keep it really simple. What drives value in the business? This is what you want all teams in the business to be focussed on.

Be clear on what this value is – P&L result, number of members, value to members?  Value is different for all companies, so defining this upfront is imperative as it will drive the overall levers.

Decide what levers will deliver your desired outcome – confirm can it be measured – if it can’t, it can’t be a lever.

Highlight levers that are easy to pivot on – no matter how well versed you are in business, no one has all the answers. So starting off with levers that are easy to change gives you an opportunity to test what works.

Highlight the levers that are difficult to change – get ahead of the eight ball and work out a strategy that will allow you to have some flex in this space if necessary.

Measurement is power – using the concept of measuring what matters that I spoke about last week will help your business choose levers that are easier to action, give you a clear understanding of what’s working and what’s not and, most importantly, can be embraced and developed by your team.

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If you’d like to us to share more detail on just how beneficial drivers trees can be to supporting your current strategy let us know and we will gladly send you a sample driver tree that you can manipulate in your context to help drive success.

Our team at Whiteark consists of a network of experts who work with businesses to map their value drivers and identify areas to drive an improved outcome.  Whether you’d like advice on building a driver tree, or for hands-on help, we’re here. Get in touch on whiteark@whiteark.com.au.