Why process performance and efficiency is best measured through data, rather than gut feeling.

One positive from lockdown is that I’ve re-established a regular routine morning walk or run. Being a data geek, I can’t help but review my smart watch, tracking my distance and pace and managing my overall performance. Yes, this detracts a little from the mindful experience… but I like to see what I have achieved and recorded as it makes it somehow more ‘real’.

One morning it was 30 degrees on my walk, and I assumed I was being slowed by the heat and my performance was worse. A quick glance and my smartwatch showed my pace was actually higher than my normal average – my perceived performance was contradicted by the data.

Cynics would say that pace at a point in time cannot be relied on as overall performance. It can be affected by satellite positions, overhead cover, for example. But I still had my overall time and overall average to compare to my earlier walk on the same route when it was 22 degrees and it showed I was in fact faster on the hotter day. Surprising. The moral of this tale? Don’t rely on feeling. Let data to do the talking.

Data will tell you how good your performance is and how your processes flow, deviate or get stuck.

Data will tell you how your process is performing. Flow through will tell you how many were sold, processed, completed, invoiced, closed, answered, etc. per hour, day, week… You also need to measure the quality or errors in the process and error rates need to be known. Failures can be measured as lost sales opportunities, missing data, missed calls, credits to invoices, customer complaints, returns or rejections. And measure how long it takes, whatever ‘it’ is. When tracking time, you also need to measure handoffs and delays as these can be the biggest causes of long cycle times and inefficiencies, and therefore the biggest impacting improvement when fixed. Organisations that use data to help prioritise and automate these steps can make things flow more quickly.

Are there other factors that should be considered when measuring process performance for your organisation?

Not only to compare and contrast but also to account for differences in the data, for example seasons or weather, client segmentation and market sector, or their relative importance to your business; or business unit, service line or product – it might justifiably take longer to sell high value items for example.

Of course, we don’t want to get lost in data or suffer from ‘analysis paralysis’… But without data, we may think something is working as it should – our gut feel tells us it’s okay. When, in reality, there could be errors, high processing costs, unhappy employees, and unhappy customers.

What can you do to measure process performance?

Build a simple scorecard. Start small.

Focus on leading indicators which point to where issues and failures are likely to occur before they impact your KPIs. For example, stop a transaction from being incorrectly processed before it hits the customer invoice, the customer refuses to pay the bill and you don’t see the income to cover your overheads until that error is resolved, so you can improve customer satisfaction and cashflow.

Ensure frontline teams have visibility of these scorecards and the data behind them, so that issues can be identified quickly and drilled down for resolution – and lessons are learned to avoid future repetition.

Have autonomy in those front-line teams to resolve issues within their given authority, with robust and quick escalation processes to resolve issues beyond their authority as needed.

Overall, use data to provide insight and better control the outcomes of the process, with quality, because you can’t just rely on your gut.