Thursday, February 25, 2010

Measurements ...

Measurements / metrics have been part of many corporate solutions for long.
Repeat - "Part" of the solution. Rarely the "whole" of it.

But it can be !

Here is a small experiment conducted internal to my team. There is an e-mail list where a lot of customer facing people post technical / marketing questions. A community of engineers keep looking at the list and respond.

This is a simple way of communication, however completely works based on someone looking in to it and responding. At a large team level, it somehow works out. And although its so free form (no ticket numbers, no tracking to closure), it has a lot of impact on customer sat if the responses are delayed.

The posters when do not get response in a day or two, post the same message back with "[2nd TRY]" in the subject line.

The experiment was to just count the accumulative [2nd TRY] in a month and publish the ticker count in internal websites and OPs slides. No other action was defined on what we need to do if it is 2 a month, 30 a month vs 70 a month.

Interesting thing is, this month it is running ZERO. The heightened awareness created by measurement is enough for the honor based community mechanism to do the due diligence.

Now, can we do the same with Global Warming ?? :)

1 comment:

Kamal Agrawal said...

That reminds me of another story on measurements..

A scientist was doing research on frogs. He asked the frog to jump, the frog jumped about 3 feet. He then cuts its one leg, and asks it to jump again. This time, frog jumped only 2 feet. Scientist was really thrilled!! He cuts another leg, frog jumps only 1 feet now. Will all 4 legs gone, the frog did not jump at all.

Scientist concludes his research - hearing ability of frog lies in its legs!