Creating a culture of Management by numbers

You can only

improve the KPIs you can measure

Create a culture of Management by numbers using the power of your company .What you KPIs. You should not aim to is improving improve all at once  once - start with little small steps and we promise you will get to the results faster.   Often it is hard to choose  - choose what you should you look at first - this years turnover compared with last year  or year, should you be looking at customer satisfaction after new marketing and new customer sales ?  Is or is it sales person call times or  production or and Promotional product sales?

Right The right answer is as simple as that -   measure what is important to your company and what brings you closer to your goals.

Be prepared that to get closer to those answers you will have to do some homework  homework - as BI business intelligence can do miracles on data, if it is correct. Good The good news are is that you can use  use Business Intelligence also for  for Improving your data quality and take you access a whole new world of  Numbers of numbers that actually mean something gives you insight and you can trust.

Step 1:

Identify Current Pain Points

and understand your Business Goals

A lot of Many companies start by trying to quantify their current performance. But again, as a data analyst the beauty of your job and the power of business intelligence is that you can drill into an endless amount of very detailed metrics. From clicks, site traffic and conversion rates, to service call satisfaction and renewals, the list goes on. So ask yourselfyou can get lost in an endless spiral of choices on what data and metrics to measure.

So it is important to return to the question: What makes the company better at what they do?

You can approach this question by focusing on looking at the stage of growth , where a startup of your company, the industry your work in or by department.

Lets start by considering the stage of growth your company is in. As a startup you would focus most on metrics that validate business modelsprove that the business idea works, whereas as an enterprise company you would focus on metrics like customer lifetime valueloyalty and retention.

Or, you can examine this question by industry: a services company (consultancies) would focus more on quality of services renderedcustomer satisfaction for example using the Net Promoter Score, whereas a company that develops products would focus on product usage and operating productivity.

The approach we will be using is looking at your company by department.

Ready to dive in? Start by going from top-down through examining each department to elicit requirements and isolate find the pain points and health factors for every department. Here are some examples of KPI metrics you may want to look at:
 

Product

• Product related tickets
• Customer satisfaction (NPS Net Promoter Score )
• Usage statistics (SaaS products)

Marketing

• Brand awareness
• Conversion rate
• Site traffic
• Social shares

R&D

• Number of bugs
• Length of development cycle
• App usage

Finance

• Budget forecasts and results
• Operating cash flow
• Net profit margin
• Gross profit margin

Sales

• Items sold/not sold
• Sales person targets and results
• Geographic spread of customers

CRM

• Sales person activity and gross profit over time
• Sales person time spent by customer category
• Customer value
• Customer activities

Step 2: Break It Down to A Few KPIs

Once you choose a few important KPIs, then try to break it down even further. Remember, while there’s no magic numberNow that you have found relevant KPIs to measure and track through out your company use your business goals as a guidance and break them down even more. Even though every company will be different, less is almost always more when it comes to KPIs. That’s because if you track

Tracking too many KPIs , as a data analyst you may start to lose your audience and the focus of the common business user. Choosing and details you are risking to loose track of the most important goals.

Selecting the top 7-10 KPIs is a great number to aim for and you can do that by breaking down your core business goals into a much more specific metric.

For example, in Sisense’s Professional Services Team, success is measured by our annual contract value (ACV), the number of opportunities that have been created, and by comparing renewals from this year to last year. Hila Kantor, the BI Consulting Team Leader at Sisense let us in on her thought-process when choosing KPIs:

“Managing a BI consultant group has some unique pain points. Initially I thought, how do I prevent tickets from being opened? Then that pointed to ensuring high quality work from the solutions architect. I discovered the best KPIs to measure is how many tickets were created following the a specific solution project, and measuring if the solution easily withstands a version upgrade.”

Remember, the point of a KPI is to gain focus and align goals for measurable improvement. Spend more time choosing the KPIs than simply throwing too many into the mix, which will just push the question of focus further down the road (and require more work!).

Spend time on defining and choosing your KPIs instead of adding them for the sake of having more pretty numbers and hoping they will be useful.

Step 3: Carefully Assess Your Data

 
After you have your main 7-10 elements – you can start digging into the data and start some data modelingmodelling.

A good question to ask at this point is: How does the business currently make decisions? Counterintuitively, in order to answer that question you may want to look at where the company is currently not making its decisions based on data, or not collecting the right data.

This is where you get to flex your muscles as a “data hero” or a good analyst! Take every KPI and present it as a business question. Then break the business questions into facts, dimensions, filters and order (example).

Not every business questions contains all of these elements – but there will always be a fact because you have to measure something. You’ll need to answer the following before moving on:

• What are the data sources
• Predict the complexity of your data model
• Tools to prepare, manage and analyze data (BI solution)

Do this by breaking each KPI into its data components,

For this you will need to consider based on what data decisions are made. Interestingly enough you will notice that decisions not always are made based on numbers. Sometimes product improvement decisions will be made based on the complaints of the most painful customer instead of the numbers of support issues all together or maybe even gut feeling of some managers.

In order to create a culture of number based decision making and getting the most out of your KPIs you need to focus on the metrics that you can actually measure. Do this by asking questions like: what do I need to count, what do I need to aggregate, which filters need to apply, what are the relevant dimensions? For each of these questions you have to know which where the data sources are being used and where the tables is coming from and in what format.

Consider that data will often come from multiple, disparate data sources. For example, for information on a marketing or sales pipeline, you’ll probably need Google Analytics/Adwords data combined your CRM data. As a data analyst, it’s important to recognize that the most powerful KPIs often comes from a combination of multiple data sources. Make sure you are using the right tools, such as a BI tool that has built-in data connectors, to prepare and join data accurately easilythe sales data will be coming from your ERP system, but your yearly budget is prepared in a separate excel sheet. This is where the power of the right BI solution can really shine. Flex.bi can seamlessly combine data from over 17 different sources.

Step 4: Represent KPIs in an Accurate and Effective Fashion

Congrats! You’ve connected your KPI data to your business. Now you’ll need to find a way to represent the metrics in the most effective way. Check out some of these different BI dashboard examples for some inspiration.

One tip to keep mind is that the goal of your dashboard is to put everyone on the same page. Still, users will each will have their own questions and areas where they want to explore, which is why building an interactive, highly visual BI dashboards is important. Your BI solution should offer interactive dashboards that allow its users to perform basic analytical tasks, such as filtering the views, drilling down, and examining underlying data – all with little training.

Closing

As a data analyst you should always look for what other insights you can achieve with the data that the business never thought of asking. People are often entrenched in their own processes and as an analyst you offer an “outsider’s perspective” of sorts, since you only see the data, while others are clouded by their day-to-day business tasks.

Create interactive and easy to use dashboards that your team can access, drill down, discover underlying data and perform easy analytical tasks. If suitable you can as well use wallboards and screens to display dashboard in a good visible place in your office, warehouse or at the assembly line. Using public dashboards like that will motivate your team using results, connect them across departments and make them feel involved in your companies goals.

Closing

Don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions. Start with the most basic and you’ll be surprised how big often companies don’t know the answers–and answers – and you’ll be a data hero just for asking. And flex.bi can be a your sidekick and best help when you decide to tackle the challange.

Watch Our Webinars

Why to pay for training if we provide Free Webinars and videos to watch?