For the past couple of years I’ve tracked our business on a spreadsheet that I call, “OSTRUTA: One Spreadsheet To Rule Them All.” Beyond being a fun reference to Lord of the Rings, the spreadsheet ended up with grandiose acronym because it’s big. I’ve been tracking metrics from all the different functions of the business. But as time has passed, I’ve realized that it’s not helpful.
The two big problems it poses are:
- It requires work to update. It’s not all on my shoulders, our PM updates our operational scores, but with all the competing priorities on my plate I can fall behind and update it after the fact.
- Because I’m busy, I often get it up-to-date and leap on to something else without thinking much about it. It becomes a scorecard for what has happened, but doesn’t add value from a decision making capacity. Which is its highest potential value.
Right now, I’m leaning it down, making it easier to report on, and increasing our reporting tempo.
What I realized about KPI’s is that they’re only valuable if there aren’t many of them.
Businesses are vehicles in motion. There’s a reason why you have idiot lights on your dashboard. You mainly need to worry about just your speed, gas, and whether there’s a problem with the engine. What that problem is doesn’t matter until it occurs. Only then do you take it to a mechanic to analyze it.
One of the reason tools are important is because they shape behavior. They can make you act smarter than you are. So it’s worth thinking about the design of activities. In this case: what few metrics to track and how you’ll track them.
Featured image is the Steam Machine Of Verbiest, in 1678 (Ferdinand Verbiest). Used under public domain.