Metrics Plan

A Metrics Plan describes how an organization intends to establish, implement, fund, collect, analyze, and report metrics. A Metrics Plan:

Ensures that the correct metrics are collected
Ensures that metric analysis and reporting meet all stakeholder needs
Ensures that adequate and appropriate resources (e.g., funding, personnel, tools) are available to properly perform metrics implementation, collection, and ongoing support.
Ensures that appropriate change management activities are undertaken

This is one of those that can be done at several levels, and it usually has several cuts, from a top-level strategic document to the process owner level to potentially deeper cuts lower in the organization. I am a big fan of each process owner owning their parts and it passing up.

This plan is a critical feed-in to quality management review.

A typical structure of a Metrics plan includes:

Strategy
- Rationale and Desired Outcomes
- Metrics Framework
- Success Criteria
Implementation Plan
- Steps, Timelines & Milestones
- Resources
- Governance
- Communication
- Training
Specific Metrics
- Outcome Mapping
- Outcome Action Plan
- ROI Evaluation
- Routine Analysis & Improvement Evaluation
- Retirement Plan
Data Collection
- Data Sources
- Data Flow
- Resources
- Reconciliation
System & Technology
- Data Visualization
- Support
Communication Plan
Sustainability Plan

Wisdom and Experts?

From http://smbc-comics.com/comic/wise-2

Building Experts

A question I ponder a lot – “Is the Process Owner supposed to be wise?” This is followed closely by “What is wisdom even supposed to be?” followed by “Darn that pyramid.” Honestly, I more and more think “darn that pyramid.”

No answers here, I really just wanted to share a comic I like.

Experts think differently

Communicating Uncertainty

“Advice for the government on communicating uncertainty” by Jessica Hullman on the blog Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science is a great read.

Great stuff to think about for those of us who constantly have to communicate uncertainty in our roles.

Common Ownership Challenges

Governance and ownership challenges often arise in an organization for four reasons:

Business stakeholders who resist assuming ownership of their own processes, data and/or knowledge, or have balkanized/siloed accountability
Turf wars or power struggles between groups of stakeholders
Lack of maturity in one or more areas
Resistance to established governance rules

The Business Struggles with Accountability

Processes often have a number of stakeholders, but no apparent owners. This results in opportunity costs as compulsory process changes (e.g. legislative requirements, systems capacity, or company structural changes) or process improvements are not implemented because the business process owner is unaware of the change, or no clear business process owner has been identified which leads to an increase in risk.

Sometimes processes have a number of stakeholders who all think they are the owners of parts of the process or the whole process. When this overlap happens, each supposed owner often identifies their own strategy for the process and issues their own process change instructions to conform to their understanding of the purpose of the business process. These conflicting instructions lead to frustration and confusion by all parties involved.

Lack of accountability in process and system leads to inefficient processes, organizational disharmony, and wasted energy that can be better spent on process improvements.

Turf Wars

Due to silo thinking there can be subdivided processes, owned by different parts of the organization. For example, count how many types of change control your organization has. This requires silos to be broken down, and this takes time.

Lack of Maturity

Governance is challenging if process maturity is uneven across the organization.

Failure to Adhere to Governance

It can be hard to get the business to apply policy and standard consistently.

Process Owner Deliverables

Process Owner implementations require a lot of work, but when used can drive maturity in an organization. To ensure success, it is important to have clear deliverables. Below are a few recommendations:

Task	Demonstrated by
Ensuring process objectives are met	Gap Assessment against relevant external (e.g. regulations, standards, benchmarks) and internal (e.g. policy, strategy) obligations Process Definition Document and Resource Requirements Plan
Developing, deploying, and managing process documentation	Process and procedure documented (e.g. SOP, WI, etc)
Determine training requirements	Role-based curricula in place
Determining, implementing and monitoring metrics	Metrics plan in place and in use
Improving process performance	Improvement plan in place and in use
Representing Process to Leadership	Communication plan in place and in use
Representing the process during internal audits and third-party audits and inspections	Inspection readiness plan in place and in use