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November 2010: Gaining Insights into Measurements of Success

Revenue targets. Sales quotas. Customer satisfaction rankings. Billable hours. Number of safety incidents. Units sold.

These are some of the many measurements companies and organizations use as barometers of their annual or quarterly success. Internally, all companies have identified these and other benchmarks for their success. Goals are set at the beginning of measurable periods and progress is tracked over the course of a months, quarters and years. But how do companies monitor these measurements and check progress on a timely basis? How does IT meet increasing demands for reporting data on a timely basis? And how can managers get more specific details when the reports do not provide enough information? PerformancePoint Services, a component of SharePoint 2010 Enterprise, helps address these challenges.

Abel Solutions is currently working with several companies to build dashboard sites based on PerformancePoint Services. One such client, a non-profit organization, has identified 40 key metrics for continuous monitoring as part of an overall strategy for improving the business. These 40 metrics are being integrated into an online dashboard, using the PerformancePoint component of SharePoint 2010.

The first page of the dashboard consists of a strategy map, with each topic area linking to 3-6 key measurements. On the initial strategy map, each of the indicators is automatically highlighted in green, yellow or red, to indicate whether the measurement is on-target, slightly off-target or significantly off-target. Each measurement has a more detailed page that includes information about the measurement, the methodology used for determining the color code, more granular data around the metric, and charts displaying year-to-date information. The details page for each individual metric also includes an opportunity to add specific comments about key data points. As individuals identify or wish to address questions about specific data points, they can do so by entering one or more comments directly on the dashboard.

Using SharePoint to track their metrics provides a few key opportunities for improving upon the first process.

Under the old process, several metrics are updated only once a quarter in disparate spreadsheets. While the people responsible for maintaining the spreadsheets have the current data, others in the organization are not able to see how things are going until the updated charts are reviewed at quarterly meetings. The new process allows anyone to see current trends when they are happening.

Also, in some cases with the old process, data was collected from disparate line of business databases and re-entered in the underlying spreadsheets to create the charts. Other measurements were the results of paper surveys, where the results were hand-keyed into Excel spreadsheets. These forms of data re-entry not only slowed down the process of getting updated information, it also ran the risk of mis-entered data. Tying the measurements into SharePoint and PerformancePoint allows for the direct query of data from the line-of-business systems and for electronic surveys to directly feed the dashboard. These eliminated both the risk of mis-entered data and the lack of timeliness in the old process.

Finally, the owners of various metrics often faced questions from individuals about the meanings of certain numbers. Having the ability to comment on metrics inline allows the measurement owners to reduce the number of times they have to answer the same question.