In KPI, K stands for Key

November 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : Any project must have KPIs. At first sight, defining indicators is an easy things but observation shows that it’s the contrary, most of all when it’s about a new field that is still being explored. But the problem with wrong KPIs is that, in addition to measuring the wrong things, may bring the project off the road, make success look like failure and failure like success. If anyone can find lots of indicator, the common misunderstanding is about their “Key” nature. An indicator is not key because of the importance of the project, the ego of the project manager or even because it’s an indicator. It’s key because it’s linked to the corporate project, because it makes and gives sense and because it proves an actual progress.

One can’t manage what one can’t measure and once one has invested anything in something it’s logical to try to know what came in return. Considering these wise words, organization add KPIs to all projects. Social and 2.0 ones are not exceptions. I know that many people says that, in this field, believing is enough but if faith can be helpful to start things it seldom helps to find one’s way along the path.

At first sight there’s nothing easier than setting indicators, most of all when organizations have the habit of measuring everything that’s measurable and build dashboards that look like we can be found in a plane cockpit. The result is  known ; no one understands them. Setting relevant indicators in a new field, where experience often lacks is a real challenge.

So let’s consider each point of the question, the one after the other.

• Indicator : everybody knows what an indicator. Anything that can be measured, evaluated, assessed is an indicator.

• Performance indicator : knowing that measuring everything causes nothing but confusion, it’s logical to select indicators that focus on performance. Should it be about the overall performance of the performance of the project ? I think the right choice is the second one, because of what follows.

• Key Performance Indicator : there’s a lot to say here. There’s few consensus and understanding on what ky means, what can lead to horrendous mistakes. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Social media and customer service : don’t make exceptions become mainstream

January 24, 2011 By 3 Comments

Summary : when an enterprise invests in social media to improve its customer service it may think that a good indicator of success would be the amount of interactions that will happen on this channel. That’s a mistake : the social channel aiming at dealing with exceptions, making it process generic requests overloads it without bringing any added value. It’s important not to try to attract all customer requests on this channel but, on the contrary, to distribute the requests in order the social channel will only process the few percent for which it’s irreplaceable compared to a more conventional way of doing things.

In some of my previous posts I talked about the use of social media for customer relationship, most of all to mention that it’s more a management, process and one-to-one relationships between the enterprise and the customer than a community clap-trap. Since I recently dealt with the system bandwidth issue, I’d like to digg a little further to warn against a failing that is very foreseeable.

As you have certainly understood, using social media to improve customer service makes the whole organization move in order to face the demand and not be overwhelmed. The logical consequence, once all these efforts and investments have been done, is to make them as profitable as possible. So it implies to drive as much customers and interactions on the social media platforms that are used. Wrong. It will lead the system to failure and will seriously annoy customers.

Before specifically dealing with social media, we need to understand the difference between what need an human intervention and what doesn’t. Human are essential when the situation so exceptional and complex that an automated processing won’t work or when the customer is not able to initiate this processing by himself. Knowing that, compared to an automated system, human are not scalable, they have to focus on what they’re unique at. Typically the two ends of the Gauss Curve, the center needing an automated processing that may be launched by the customer itself (on web sites, online forms, voice systems…). Example ; no human should have to fill a form that the customer could fill by himself if he could access it.

So, human should be kept for what can’t be automated and customers that are not able to use the tools they’re given. Then, many channels exist depending on the context of the customer, his prefered devices, the fact he’s in a mobility situation. So there’s a wide range of tools that goes from the traditional call center to social media (both being complementary and not alternative). Why is it important ? Because everything that does not need an human processing and lands on an human channel saturates it and prevents it from dealing with what it should.

Maybe you guess where my thoughts are heading… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Actual improvements are not only perceived but measurable

August 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Résumé : we are far from being done with the enterprise 2.0 ROI debate. On the one hand, applying traditional and predictable is nearly impossoble, on the other hand contenting oneself with saying “people use it so that’s great” is not easy since businesses need to know what’s been done with the money that’s been invested. In the midde of this “all or nothing” land, a third way exists. Albeit all is not about financial benefits, albeit a qualitative dimension exists for sure, there are ways to domonstrate things concretely improved without useless complex calculations. To go further on existing projects and keep on convincing those who haven’t started, “we can see” and “we feel” must be replaced with “we can demonstrate and prove”. More than possible but too rarely done.

There’s always a time when one should be accountable for what’s been done and, most of all, when it’s been done with things one doesn’t own and have only been entrusted. Like other people’s and company’s time and money for instance. Imagine a 2.0 project manager facing his superiors, the company’s board.

- So…how is our projet doing ?

- Fine M. director, very fine.

- Great ! Tell me more. Everybody’s talking about it in the workplace and I’m looking forward to know more. According to everything I heard, I’m glad these 750 000 dollars were not thrown by the window.  (These numbers are not random…they are consistent with the report about the State of Enterprise 2.0 issued by the Adoption Council. 60% of surveyed companies admit they allocated more than $500 000 in their project,)

- We already have 40 000 members, one hundred blogs and communities and most of them are very active. I don’t even mention the hundreds of micro-blogging messages sent every day. A great success !

- Great ! But, what about factual results ?

- Just look : they share information, ask questions, find the answers. They learn from each other, solve problems ! We’re on the highway to success !

- Humm

- That strenghtens the feeling of belonging within the company. People connect, discover other people. More, they are proud of being parts of a compant that provides them with modern and state of the art tools. New hires feel they joined a modern business !

- I understand. But…you know…$750 000 dollars is not nothing. What has been improved, what is being done better ? At then end, the purpose of all that is to make people more efficient…and the company too.

- People are happier, we innovate, we solve problems…

- And what does it change ?

- I just told you…

- I mean…what proves what you say ? I have to be accountable too you know !

- Je veux dire…qu’est ce qui vient prouver ce que vous me dites ? Moi aussi je dois rendre des comptes vous savez…

-…

- I understand what you say and I’m aware of that. I’m glad you dit it and you deserve congratulations. But please, give me some tangible, “solid” things, something clear with simple and undisptutable indicators,.

Does this scene looks funny ? There are chances it will happen more and more. The matter is not to discuss the benefits of enterprise 2.0 as in many cases, as the project manager says, “we can see it”. But a moment comes when people need numbers, facts. Should it only be to manage the project, measure the change, improve the change management, do it even more.

The list of benefits is known and long. But we have to admit one thing : we can  read as many case studies as we want, attend conferences, there are only two explainations

- the indicators that are used and the results they got are too confidential to be shared.

- nothing is measured except the vitality of the platform. The rest is observed and that’s ok.

Let’s go back to our project manager…

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business Tagged With: , , , ,

Is workload measurement the problem of the century ?

January 14, 2010 By 10 Comments

Optimizing workload has always been a key concern for businesses and managers. A too heavy workload regarding to the capacity leads to explosion, a too low workload means resources are wasted. I don’t even mention last minute assignments to face imponderables. In brief, bad adjustments have an heavy price.

In a manufacturing economy things are more or less easy to manage. The capacity of a machine or the impact of bottlenecks on an assembly line are known facts. As for people accomplishing standardized tasks in such a context, the time needed to execute a precise task at a given level of quality is known too. When imponderables come, it’s easy to identify if an added production capacity is available since the maximal and actual workload are known facts too for machines. As for people, a glance at their work-in-progress is sometimes enough to evaluate the sitation. In short, in a tangible production system, it’s easy to know the sitation at a given moment and what’s the safety margin (if any). More, the situation can even sometimes be assessed by having a look around.

The move toward an intangible economy makes things more complicated. First because things are less and less linear and setting an optimized production planning that matches reality is a very difficult task, if not impossible. Tasks become problems to solve, solutions to find and if average durations can be calculated afterwards, making it a priori as a forecast looks like accomplishing a miracle. More, talking about knowledge work, notions like quantity and quality are closer than ever. That’s for what’s foreseeable (or looks like) and it’s even worse for unforseeable things.

This is a problem that’s both about production performance and management. In this problematic, our modern tools, even if they are a part of the solution are also the cause of new issues that are far from being trivial. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Enterprise 2.0 and the measurement hypocrisy

December 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Managers use to say that one can’t manage what is not measurable. We can also add that businesses don’t undertake things they can’t drive. So the conclusion is that businesses don’t unertake anything if they can’t measure the result. It may be a statement of the obvioux but it’s always worth reminding it. Talking about social media, how many projects were left in the waiting room due to the lack of measurable impact. “You know…connect people, share information etc… is very nice, but it’s hard to demonstrate the impact”.

Then let me add a third adage of my own invention : there is not a thing that is harder to measure than those one dont’ want to measure.

Please remind that a social software projet has to be measured at three levels : activity, alignement of contents and business purposes and use of the contents and new “connection practices” to improve organizational performance.

I won’t write again what I wrote in the above-mentioned post, but if a social software project, whatever its nature is, does not bring any change to a few and clear business metrics, that means that either the tools are used on a wrong way or that is was implemented regardless to sense and alignement.

Let’s state it once and for all : everything can be measured. Sometimes in a simple and easily identifiable fashion, sometimes with more complex tools when it comes to back by figures intangible things. All the same, many tools exist to measure how people feel about such or such things, sometimes by conducting surveys, and it’s up to project managers to decide to use them. That’s the way to know if people find things are going better, if knowledge is more accessible, if they feel more engaged, if they find that a better access to their colleagues helps them doing things better and faster, il they think discussions makes the corporate message easier to understand…. For all the rest, direct and quantitative indicators exist.

Knowing that, we may be able to say that, depending on the project, we can measure the impact of social software through business indicators or (sometimes with…) surveys (for what is about subjective feelings…especially in the communication and HR field) and that the issue is closed. Unfortunately it’s not. Not because things are not measurable but because people don’t want to measure them.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business Tagged With: , , ,

10 questions to answer to succeed in an Enterprise 2.0 project

November 10, 2009 By 1 Comment

It’s a common place to say that if you want to succeed there are things that have to be done. But, by focusing only on actions and forget thinking, the risk of doing hudge mistakes is obvious, that’s why so many opportunities are wasted. To succeed, you also need to have answers. Answers that allow you to go from one step to the next one. Answers that make you sure you’re not managing the wrong project. Answers you’ll have to provide to you boss to prove you’re not throwing his money through the windows and that your project desserves funding and his active sponsorhip.

At each step of your project, you have to wonder if you have the answer to some key questions. If you don’t, slow down and take the time to find it instead of insisting in a direction that may be wrong.

If we assume that a project is made of 3 phases, exploration (when you try to understand a new phenomenon,), pilot (when you validate what you thought you have understood) and industrialization (when you scale things up to make them company-wide), here a 10 questions you must be able to answer to.

There is not always an only right answer. But an answer is needed. When the choice is between “yes” or “not” I let you guess what is right one and what the other means…

1°) At the end of the exploration phase

What are the tools I’m planning to use do and don’t do ? More precisely, what are they designed for, and what aren’t they designed for.

Do I have any idea of how my project will change the way people work ? Can I visualize what the workplace will look like then ? And am I ready to assume.

Can I demonstrate the project’s impact on the value chain, on value creation, on people’s efficiency ? (At least theorically)

2°) While running pilots

Are the contents and information published and shared by “real” users or by people who have been assigned this task to make things look busy.

Have I formalized and shared the expected “outcomes” ? And checked they made sense in people’s day to day work ?

Am I sure that the purpose of people that play a part in the project (whether internal or external) is to deliver these outcomes or to make enough noise in the tool to deserve their pay ? Does the use of the tool have become the project’s goal to the detriment of operational objectives ?

Have I organized the way how the expected social interactions and what they’ll produce will be reused for business purpose (ex : how an idea will become a project, how people will be able to access and reuse their peer’s knowledge, how one will be able to mobilize people  found through these interactions…)

Did I thought about “social routine” with managers, and began its implementation ?

3°) In the industrialization phase

Do I have concrete indicators that measure social logic’s contribution to business (lenght of the innovation cycle, lenght of the sales cycle, turnover, number of best practices formalized, meetings avoided, ideas gathered, lenght of the decision making cycle, decrease of the time spent by managers to connect people together…)

Do I have examples of things that would not have happened without the project ? And what was their impact.

Of course this is not an exhaustive list but I’m sure that the inability to provide the answer to one of these questions (or provide the wrong one) may have painful consequences one day or the other while taking the time to think about it at the right moment would prevent from future disappointments.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Your indicators say that your online communities are very busy ? So what ?

October 20, 2009 By 1 Comment

When a social media project is launched, whether internal or external, it’s often structured in groups or communities. What every project manager fear is to end with empty or moribund communties, so making them busy is an obvious goal from which indicators are drawn. This is pure logic. These indicators are linked to the the use of the tools that support the project. It’s also logical.

It’s obvious that if the indicators depress (ie the community is dead) it’s a bad news and it’s important to take things in hand. But is it right to assume that things are doing well when indicators are doing well too.

Of course, no benefit can be expected is the tool is not used. (Saying that I assume that the whole project was designed and positioned in order to bring real operational benefits and that the tool supports processes that contribute to value creation in one way or another).

But even in the opposite situation, viligance is needed.

- lots of members (or even a satisfying number). Ok, people registered. And so what ? They updated their profile ? Came back once, twice, regularly ? And why do they come for ? Make sure nothing has changed since their last connection ? (Of course I don’t mention the hypothesis of people being registered automatically whithout knowing why…)

- lots of groups are created ((or even a satisfying number) : that’s one more step. Who structures the social space wants to use it and identified needs that groups can meet. But, at the beginning, the number of groups created “only to try” may be huge so being carried away may be a mistake at this time. In fact it’s not a risk but a common practice for users who try to find out what they can do with their new tools. Then, according to the governance, some groups may not be work-related (but some companies accept it because it helps to foster relationships anyway). Of course, I’m not talking about groups created by the company according to its organizational-chart or its own expecations, without making sure that the people in the groups know what’s it about and feel engaged.

- lots of contents (or even a satisfying number) : so you have users distributed among purpose driven groups. Well. If the indicators say some (or a lot) of content is published, you are getting closer to success. But here agin, try to find what’s the reality behind the numbers. On a qualitative point of view first (is the information useful, does it help people to move forward, to improve..) Then have a look at the publications/members ratio. Of course if you have a group open to anyone and if your purpose is to gather as many people as possible to sensibilize them about something, the 1-9-90 rule should apply. If you group is made of people who actually work together in real life, everyday, who have shared goals, participation should be more balanced. If 95% of the contents come from one only person whose job is to feed the group in order it won’t look like a dead end…your indicator is biased. You are doing nothing but moving the main function of you old intranet into on a social platform. It may be a transitional step but in no way a solution for a project that is meant to bring any added value.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Socializing your decision making process

August 4, 2009 By 1 Comment

A good example of process socialization is about decision making. A few weeks ago I read this interesting paper from Olivier Sibony (Associate Director at McKinsey). Since the article is in French I hope Google Translator will provide you with a good english translation.

What is it about ?

Making the right decisions is key to be a successful business. Nothing new here. But Olivier Sibony provides us with interesting numbers.

. Between those who have used the analysis tools the most advanced and recognize those who were far away, the performance gap is important: 2.7 points in return on investment between them. But those who have followed a process of rigorous and objective decision showed a much higher performance: the gain is 7.3 points ROI ! In other words, there are three times more to gain by using a method of decision-making!

The impact of a good decision is obvious and its ROI clear enough to justify enteprises invest in what makes it possible. It would seem obvious that the solution is to be brought by analysis tools and the definition of relevant indicators. Nothings social here. At first sight…

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

McKinsey identifies 6 key sucess factors for enterprise 2.0

March 10, 2009 By Leave a Comment

McKinsey recently issued a report on enterprise web 2.0 projects which identifies what they think being the six success factors for such projects. Before reading what follows, I suggest you to read what they were saying about that a few months ago in order to get some distance.

Context

Companies has been trying to optimize their transactional processes (ERP, CRM) for a long time. Now, we’re getting close to the end of what these logics can bring and the next challenges are about collaboration and participation. In this approach, many businesses tried to import web 2.0 tools within their organization, hoping they will “de facto” bring the same resultats as those we can see on the general public web. Most of times they failes, for two reasons. The first is the uncomfort of managers toward the potential risks implied by the needed changes. The second comes from the fact managers don’t know how to encourage and make possible the form of collaboration that can create value. Whatever, companies will persist and this market will experience a significant growth in 2009.

According to me it’s a classical analysis of the current situation and issues what does nothing but confirm what many experts have been saying for years. What is good it that somethings things are most likely to be heard when the come with a McKInsey logo.

Technically speaking I would make a reservation about the first chart of the report. According to me web 2.0 is also about transactions, but a different kind of transactions than those that were taken into account before. Maybe it would be useful to qualify more this evolution of the nature of transactions to have a better positionning for this kind of project.

For what’s about companies’ perseverance, I think it’s unavoidable. After having focused on optimizing processes, new performance pools have to be found elsewhere and, I as wrote earlier, the current crisis is more about management and business models than purely economic. So, finding new ways of operating in alignment with tomorrow’s business models is strategic.

Second reservation : in their web 2.0 tools chart, all of them are postionned as being broad communication or creation tools but social networks which appears as being about social graphing. I think we have to get rid of the common general public vision of social networks to make them used to collaborative and intelectual proximity analysis. Their purpose may not be to link people but link people through information and information through people.

Whatever, here are my thoughts about this 6 success factors.

Quoi qu’il en soit McKinsey a identifié six facteurs de succès pour réussir les projets web 2.0 en entreprise. Je vous laisse lire le rapport pour prendre connaissance de leurs analyses, voici le regarde que je porte dessus.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Enterprises far beyond enterprise 2.0

January 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago I amused myself proposing a few tracks on what enterprise 2.0 may be in 2009. But I think pushing the reflection beyond would be worth : enterprise 2.0 is only a side of a much complex reality that is enterprise and will be of any use only in a global framework. Since enterprise, and economy in general, can be defined as the place where more and more numerous interactions melts, believing it can be improved by only cosmetic improvements. Evry initiative that’s not aligned with a macro vision that will take all these considerations into account won’t bring anything worthy.

So, let’s put ourselves in the main player’s place.

• The top management

The less we can say is that top management is very worried. Because of the downturn, CEOs are trying to protect the organization. It’s hard to find more revenue so, in order to preserve the result they want costs to be cut. Or spendings, which is not the same thing. In the other hand they know that if they keep on cutting costs, they will soon be unable to make any cent go in the bank so they try to find how to make work more efficient, to work on costs instead of expenses. And, finally, the idea of business networks comes to the surface. But how to make it happen ?

On the other hand, this crises is about something deeper that worries them a lot. Always promising more has its limits and now it seems that these limits have been reached.  Do they have to stop promising the moon since they know organization’s performance have its limit and trying to balance it with financial performance leads to the situation we now know ? Do we have reached the limits of a system and is this crisis the consequence of a management model failure. Do we have to reinvent the way we do business ?

In brief, an increasing demand for more responsability and sustainability in management, that is not so far from a tendency that brings many companies to think their development together with their human ecosystem’s in order not to ruin their tomorrow’s markets.

Many issues that have a lot in common and that, without forseeing the answers that will be given, will have to be taken into account this year.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts