Measurements and KPIs are crucial for our ability to improve. Used in the right way, they provide a vital ability for us to ‘see’ where we are, they enable feedback and allow us to make adjustments to ourselves, teams and businesses. The right measures can even be inspiring and unifying. However, picking the wrong measures or applying them without consideration can limit performance and promote behaviours you don’t want (or more commonly, didn’t expect).

1. Is your ladder leaning
against the right wall?
A short workshop about measurements,
KPIs and behaviours.
*Montreux, Switzerland - Lake side, statue showing boy climbing a ladder to reach the sky

2. “If the ladder is not leaning against the
right wall, every step we take just gets
us to the wrong place faster.”
- Stephen R. Covey

4. Session Aims
To discuss and think about measurements within organisations
We’ll cover…
- The importance of shared understanding
- How misaligned measures impact outcomes
- The influence of measures on behaviour
- What to look out for

5. About Stephen

6. A Boeing Delta II 7425 launch vehicle lifts off with NASA’s Mars
Climate Orbiter on Dec. 11, 1998 at a cost of $193.1 million.
The orbiter made it to Mars, but burned up in the atmosphere.
Diagnosis found that the cause of the failure was in the
software controlling the orbiter’s thrusters.
Calculate thrust in pounds
Calculate thrust in kilograms
Unfortunately, NASA assumed the numbers from Lockheed
Martin were already converted.

7. What actually is an outage?
Do we get penalised in a 30 or 28
day month?
(yes – 99.942 and 99.938)
Does this include maintenance?
1. Number of minutes in month:
Number of days in month * 24 hours
x 60 minutes
= 44,640 minutes for October
2. We’ve had two outages on platform:
Outage 1: 8 minutes
Outage 2: 17 minutes
3. Calculating availability
25 minutes as a percentage of 44,640
= 0.05600358… %
100% - 0.05600358…% = 99.944…%
Availability this month to date is
= 99.94% (4SF)

8. Instructions
In your group, read the provided content and discuss what metrics or KPIs you would use
to measure your team’s performance.
- What are the metrics?
- Are there any conditions to the measures (like the availability example)
- Write the 2-3 most important measures on post-its
- Be ready to share!
15 minutes
Exercise: Functional Measures

9. Scenario 1
A Customer is struggling with a problem on the platform and they need help. The cause
might be in the infrastructure or software, and needs diagnosis.
Scenarios
Scenario 2
There’s a significant storage platform outage impacting around 50% of our Customers.
Scenario 3
Sales are frustrated that it takes too long to on-board new Customers.

10. 1st Line Development Server Team
Individual KPIs and Objectives

11. “You get what your measure”
which unfortunately can be a very narrow range

13. Time to answer (seconds) FTF (resolution on first call)
Service Desk Agent

14. Number of calls made Number of meetings held
Sales / Account Manager

15. Negative Behaviours / Consequences Positive Behaviours / Consequences
Wemeetthetarget
- Do we risk complacency?
- Will attention shift to other problems?
- Unconsciously think uptime ‘done’. Stifle
innovation.
- (maybe) reward the toil / heroes / overtime
- Pride and desire to repeat
- Communication platform for customers
- Time could be used for added-value
Wemissthetarget
- Morale drop
- Customer dissatisfaction
- Managers applying pressure
- Blame
- Kneejerk responses (e.g. purchasing)
- (maybe) reward the toil / heroes / overtime
- It might inspire action/innovation
- Chance to request resources (e.g. CPU)
- Learning comes from failure
Server Team success measure: Systems Uptime (99.99%)

16. Negative Behaviours / Consequences Positive Behaviours / Consequences
Wemeetthetarget
- Further or over engineering (waste)
- Did we balance our work or over-prioritise?
- Did we do unnecessary maintenance?
- Too much maintenance annoys customers
- Pride and desire to repeat
- Communication platform for customers
- Learning to spot issues sooner
- Improving playbooks
Wemissthetarget
- Temptation to falsely report in future
- Managers applying pressure
- (maybe) reward the toil / heroes / overtime
- (if incidents) Kneejerk responses
- (if incidents) blame
- Will inspire look into monitors and methods
- Desire to complete RCAs and causal chains
- (likely) less repeat incidents
Server Team success measure: #Critical Incidents Prevented > 0

17. In your group, choose 1-2 metrics from your business and fill in the worksheet.
If you’re not sure what to choose, here are some options:
- HR Team measuring attrition (the % of leavers in a rolling year, typically 12-15%)
- Sales team measuring new revenue in £
- Development team measuring speed of deployment (minutes/hours)
- HR Team measuring time-to-hire (weeks)
- CEO measuring employee lateness (# people arriving late)
20 minutes
Exercise: Metric Consequences

18. Connecting to why.
Ultimate Objective Key Result
Key Result
Org. Objective
Function Objective
Initiative
Key Result
Key Result
Key Result
Key Result
Function Objective
Initiative
3-20 Years
1 Year
3 Months
Task
Task
Days/Weeks

19. Connecting to why.
Improve alignment
through OKRs
Train every employee in OKR
purpose and practice
People are feeding back to each
other at least weekly
Everyone’s OKR data is up to date
(within 1 day)
Improve our testing
procedures
Implement TDD in 3 new development
teams
Increase unit test coverage to 75%
of code
Conduct a security assessment of our
codebase using automated tools
Refactor old user
mgmt. module
Rewrite and launch new version of our user
management module
Survey 15 external API users re:
issues with authentication
Rewrite the API user authentication for
new version

20. OKR Rules (Mindvalley)
1. Less is more
2. The KRs must be measurable without debate
3. Individuals self-score their results (anything above 0.7 (70%) as green)
4. OKRs should be a 50/50 split up and down
5. Remain flexible!
6. All OKRs and data is transparent
7. Think big! Include OKRs that have a 50% chance of failing
8. OKRs are a tool, not a weapon
9. OKRs should be holistic and include 1 personal goal
10. Does it help you structure?
Mindvalley talk on OKRs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObUus0naBYA
Google intro to OKRs: https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/set-goals-with-okrs/steps/introduction/

21. Concluding Thoughts
1. Find a method to connect what gets measured with a holistic outcome
2. Whatever you measure, take time to check for understanding in people
3. Take some time to think about (or check-in with) what behaviours are being
influenced by your measures
4. Check how forcefully measures are applied (and expectations outside the
team, especially ‘management’)
5. Balance out the risk of negative behaviours with other metrics (i.e.
Qualitative + Quantitative)

23. 07967 682006
linkedin.com/in/stephencloud
stephen@opensquareconsulting.com
Thank you
About Open Square
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want to grow, build amazing
teams and deliver better
results.
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