Tim Berry highlights the value of metrics;
It’s been a lot of years with a lot of concentration on what’s good about business planning, and how it works in a business when it works well, that I’ve realized the magic of metrics. A good business planning process generates metrics throughout the business: not just the obvious sales and cost of sales and expenses, but milestones with dates and deadlines, and tracking of metrics such as calls, presentations, programming modules, trips, key word insertions, downloads, page views, conversion rates, subscriptions, leads, and so on. For every job there’s the hope of an objective metric that people can live and work with. A good business planning process goes from the high-level general to the specific steps and then to the metrics, and tasks, and responsibilities. Make commitments.
Riddle: in the classic bacon and eggs breakfast, what’s the difference between the pig and the chicken?
Answer: the chicken’s involved, the pig is committed.
Metrics are magic. Build metrics and a planning process, and, as if by magic, you and your team members (friends, or not) are suddenly standing together looking at the metrics. The positive and negative feedback is there in the numbers. You both see them together. You both remember what the goal was, and you look together at performance.
