Don’t Waste Your Metrics [Lessons from the Road]
My latest column for Industry Week, Lessons from the Road, titled Don’t Waste Your Metrics has been posted. Here is the intro:
Most every company has metrics permeating every meeting, discussion and decision. Metrics are as ubiquitous as email and problem solving and taken for granted to an equal level. Here are some keys to making them work for you.
You can read the entire post here.
Here are my previous Lessons from the Road columns:
Experiment Your Way to Success
How the mother of all learning methods can help your organization improve.
4/18/2012
Securing the Elusive Lean Buy-In
Take advantage of this four-step process to achieve buy-in for your lean efforts.
2/15/2012
Building Manager Standard Work
Standardization can help you free up time and use it more proactively.
11/16/2011
Going to the Gemba
Far from a stroll on the plant floor, a gemba represents a purposeful attempt to learn what is really going on.
9/14/2011
How to Train Without Training
When training dollars are scarce, there are still good ways to develop your workforce. Try these three strategies.
7/20/2011
Lessons From the Road: Sustaining Your 5S Efforts
5S too often is short-lived, but these six steps can help keep it running smoothly.
5/17/2011
Lessons From the Road: Surfacing Problems Daily
Advice for building a problem-solving culture.
3/16/2011
Are you familiar with Goal Question Metric?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GQM
Hi Jamie
You are right on, to often we save record and store data that has little or no real use. Doing so is a waste of computer resources and storing it is a waste of time for people and equipment that could instead be used productively. Keeping unneeded data just cause confusion and wastes people time analyzing the useless instead of just focussing on what is important and can be used to take action now.
Financial accounting though legally required, does nothing to help solve problems, because by the time it reports are created, it is yesterdays news. By knowing your business in common sense terms you can find a few key pionts that need to be tracked to tell you in realtime when you are having problems so you can take action to correct them. Accounting reports will never do that, by the time they can be created, the problem may will and shouldn’t exist anymore, but if you wait for them it is more likely far worse.
Robert