Category: Culture
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Lowering the Cost of Failure
Yesterday, as I was driving near DB Kay & Associates “World Headquarters” in Santa Cruz, I noticed a home-painted smart car. I wasn’t quick enough with my camera to take a picture, but it looked kind of like this. Pretty cool, right? Kind of fun? I actually imagined a family afternoon with paint brushes or…
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Feedback: Style Matters! Allscripts Does It Right
Reports are boring. Can we all agree on this? Sure, reports may contain interesting information. But there’s something deeply stultifying about the actual presentation of the data in commercial reporting packages. With apologies to my friends at business intelligence vendors, it’s almost as though the designers had set out to create bad “before” examples for…
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What Do We Do About All Of These Myths?
Goodness me, listen to me go on about these metric myths. If you’ve made it this far, you can be forgiven for asking, “That’s all fine, but what do I do about it?” Metrics exist in a context, and that context isn’t going to change itself just because some consultant writes a few blog posts. …
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Metrics Myth 11: Any Initiative for Which You Can’t Define Clear Outcomes Isn’t Worth Doing
This is another inference from “you get what you measure.” If you don’t know how to measure an initiative, you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve. And if you don’t know why you’re undertaking an initiative, you shouldn’t do it. Fair enough. But isn’t it sometimes the case that we have an intuition that…
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Reaping the KCS Rewards: Daktronics Does It Right
There’s nothing like hearing about KCS from someone who is actually doing it—and benefitting from it. Our friends at Daktronics just sent this great email along, and kindly gave us permission to share it on the blog. Daktronics is a South Dakota-based manufacturer of LED signboards, from high school football scoreboards to major league arena…
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Metrics Myth Nine: NPS is Whatever I Say It Is
I’ll just say it right now: I love the Net Promoter Score. It may not be perfect, but in my experience, it’s the most powerful tool that Service and Support executives have to demonstrate their value to the entire enterprise, become more strategic in how they think about their organization’s mission, and focus the entire…
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Metrics Myth Eight: Hold an Ops Review Where Changes are Scrutinized and Punishments are Meted Out
Operations Reviews, or ops reviews, are common management tools in Support organizations. If you’re going to measure something, goes the logic, it’s best to act on those measurements. Making course corrections sooner means that things get fixed sooner, with less customer impact. Bad habits don’t have time to take root. Quick, decisive action at a…
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Metrics Myth Seven: Find Industry Peers and Benchmark Against Them
As a consultant, I find it rare to spend fifteen minutes with a capable executive before she asks me to assess how they’re doing compared with other companies. It’s a fair question: how can you know if you’re best in class unless you know how well other organizations are doing? And if you’re not yet…
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Metric Myth Six: Do an ROI Analysis Before Investing in a Major Purchase or Initiative
There’s nothing wrong with doing an ROI analysis—as a matter of fact, I think it’s a great idea. It’s just that the way that we, as an industry, typically use them is all backwards. They’re shouldn’t be a checkpoint; they’re a process. Let’s back up and define our terms. A Return on Investment (ROI) analysis…