Management Bug

A result indicator is a metric that measures the quantitative results of business actions to help companies track progress and reach organizational goals.

Result Indicators offer an overview of past performance, help corporate management unify information on a company or department’s performance, and provide insight into what steps leaders should take to improve.

Result indicators can be financial or non-financial indicators and reflect more than one team’s activity, thus showing how groups are working together. (1)

Result indicators is a goal-setting method that has been around for decades, and it is known to bring many benefits to organizations. The benefits come to those who follow best practices and avoid the most common mistakes. (3)

Without measuring: - we’re doing no better than guessing. - we can’t know if our actions are working or not - we don’t do better than mediocre. - we can’t anticipate and prevent or mitigate problems. - we can’t agree on what success looks like. - we can’t objectively prioritize. - we suffer from uncertainty and a lack of self-efficacy. - any attempt at using data will be trivial.

So unless you want an organization that is content with guessing and fighting fires, doesn’t care if its investments are wasteful or what success looks like, prefers popularity over priorities and uncertainty over self-efficacy, then you need to measure performance. (2)

The combination of the result indicators can and should produce a North Star Metric. A North Star metric is the one measurement that’s most predictive of a company’s long-term success. To qualify as a “North Star,” a metric must do three things: lead to revenue, reflect customer value, and measure progress. If a metric hits those three points, and every department contributes to improving it, the company will grow sustainably, or so the theory goes. (4)

Usual Suspects

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Sources

Since we believe the Management Bugs are common and typical, every description is created and adapted from articles, blog posts, and definitions from other sources and authors:

(1) https://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/definition/key-results-indicator-KRI (2) https://www.staceybarr.com/measure-up/what-happens-if-we-dont-measure-performance/ (3) https://weekdone.com/resources/benefits-of-okrs (4) https://mixpanel.com/blog/north-star-metric/