Business, high quality
Visionary Metrics
March 15, 2016 - Business, high quality
A large school district vehicle maintenance operation has an excellent performance dashboard with relevant and timely metrics that monitors and provides feedback to both the operation as a whole and the mechanics. There was one metric that was unusual. It was unique and when understood it, it was visionary.
While the dashboard had all of the traditional metrics for bus accidents by type, repair and inspection times, inventory, number of error free repairs, maintenance cost per mile, maintenance cost by type and age of vehicle, fleet miles per gallon……there was also this one:
The number of days the maintenance shop had without a “non-scheduled repair”.
With a fleet approaching 200 vehicles, the average age of the fleet of about 8 year and drivers conducting a pre and post vehicle inspection daily, the questions were:
- “How is the number of days without an unscheduled repair meaningful?”
- What did this actually measure?
The answers were enlightening.
The director of Maintenance indicated the metric popped out during a discussion answering the question, “If the department did it job perfectly, what would happen?” The team felt that if:
- The preventative maintenance system worked
- The inspection system early identified potential issues
- Quality service and scheduled maintenance was performed
- Inventory had the right parts
Then the shop should have a minimum number of unscheduled repairs. So they agreed to count the number of days this happened and it became a new catalytic metric for a culture change to a high performance workshop. While they know they will never have zero days a month, they work towards it. It is like a good vision statement that is not easily attainable but acts as a catalyst for what the company wants to become. Thus began the term “visionary metrics”.
The concept of “visionary metric” is new. It is not about metrics related to a corporate vision statement. It is more about a metric that can be found at any level or function in an organization that reflects important aspects of value and drives actions and decision-making, aspects that don’t lend themselves easily to the traditional metrics. A visionary metric for a product or service must reflect and capture the value delivered. Since value is a consequence of a myriad of activities, a review of the “chain of consequences” was initiated
In a small work session on the subject of visionary metrics, the group felt that you needed to first explore the impact and consequences of successful performance. A sales group had a set of metrics that they were performing well against, and question asked was, “What is the consequence of achieving your sales target, your closing rate, your margin targets and your customer retention rates?” Then you take that answer such as the first response was, “The sales team gets their bonuses” and the next question was, “What is the consequence of that?” and the next answer was “They feel a sense of achievement” “And then?” we asked and the answer was “The team has a sense of pride working here”. We kept going and asked about consequences again with the next answer being “They begin to tell other people that the company is a great place to work” and then, “The department gets a good reputation” and then, “We become an inspiration for other departments”
The sales group then converted the answers to goals and metrics were created. Some results:
- To have the sales staff have a “Sense of Achievement” and the new monthly metric: % of staff that learned something new about themselves
- To have the staff feel that “This is a great place to work” and the new weekly metric: % of staff who had a real good week – which led to a productive discussion of what made a great day in the department.
- To have the department “Be an Inspiration” and the new monthly metric: The % of staff that fielded questions from other people in the company about the Sales Department – and the questions were documented to learn about what others were hearing or found interesting.
In the quality field, there is a “5-Why’” technique to determine the root cause of a problem. In this case we used a new method of “The 5 Consequences” to learn from their success and establish new goals and visionary metrics.
