Measuring Business Expectations is Like Taking its Pulse

Last week, I wrote about the most frequent question our helpdesk receives from our clients. During the course of developing that topic, I thought about whether the issue that was most popular last week — maintaining mission-critical software — was the most popular last quarter. Or the quarter before that. And I didn’t immediately know the answer.

“What gets measured, gets done.”

I had to dig into our records to find the answer. The rest of the list is fairly technical — and designed more for IT technicians and service managers (if you are interested, email me and I’ll get you the entire list). But the larger question stuck with me. And it applies to everyone.

What are you measuring? How have you seen any improvement? What are you doing about it?

“Inspect what you expect.”

My team knows exactly what is expected of them: track tickets in categories and then review them each quarter to determine how to reduce these types of issues.

I inspect this during our Quarterly Business Review – which includes the Operations, Sales, and Financial departments for our business.

Do you inspect what is expected of your team? Or are your employees taking certain liberties that might be reducing the overall value or vision of your product?