A new year is a great opportunity to establish a new measurement strategy, resurrect an old one, or fuel an existing one. A good measurement strategy enables a sustainable process with resources to efficiently collect and monitor your key measures of success. Too often, resolutions are made and quickly forgotten. So it is with measurement. Here are five ideas to help you keep the “measure more” resolution this year.

1. Make a commitment to your boss or a stakeholder that you’re going to put more emphasis on measurement, either across the board or for a specific high profile initiative. You’re surely not going to put it on the back burner again if you’ve made a commitment to your boss!
2. Incorporate measurement as one of your performance goals or MBOs (management by objective). It’s a sure way to light a fire under your seat and get you started on it!
3. Delegate measurement as a responsibility to one of your resources. Give them the knowledge, tools, and skills they need to be successful. If you give someone the responsibility and the tools, they are going to see to through.
4. Measure a few things, not everything. But measure them, set targets for outlying periods, monitor, and take corrective actions along the way. Part of measuring is taking action on the results, so be sure to complete the process. If you do it right, you’ll quickly see the success it breeds.
5. Put a line item for measurement in your budget. Organizations that spend $2-$10 per employee annually on measurement tools see dramatic improvements in efficiency and measurability of human capital’s impact.

As always, let us know your thoughts on how measurement is improving what you do in your organization...

- Chris Moore, President, Zeroed-In Technologies

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Learning management ≠ learning measurement
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Almost instinctively, executives discount reports on learning’s impact as too simplistic or attributable to non-learning factors. If those reports aren’t improving learning’s standing, you’re missing real opportunity.

A common fallacy is that learning management incorporates learning measurement. Wrong. Yes, it’s true that organizations invested tens of thousands in a learning management system (LMS), and perhaps a vendor demonstrated some evaluation and surveying capabilities and then showed a slick report or two. But the truth is LMS-type tools rarely measure value or show alignment to what stakeholders and managers want to see. They are data management tools not measurement or reporting tools. If your organization is like most, the LMS is data rich but information poor: There are dozens of canned reports that came with the LMS, but only a fraction of them are useful. For reporting of any value, you likely develop custom reports using 3rd-party reporting tools.

Before you head off and start developing new reports, you should evaluate your existing reports as well as the reports being requested to ensure good decisions and action can be taken from the results. Based on the answers to the following questions, determine whether the person producing the report should be working on something more important, or whether the report needs to be altered or expanded:

• What do/will you do with the report?
• What decisions does/will it help you make?
• What is the norm or target for the metrics on the report?
• What actions do/will you take if the report deviates from the norm?
• On a scale of 1 to 5, how important is this report to your work success?
• How quickly can you refresh the report with current data points?
• Is the report too granular or not granular enough?
• Who are the other consumers of the report? What do they do with the information? How would they answer these questions?

As I eluded, the key to a successful measurement and reporting initiative is actually using the results to make informed decisions. Basing decision making on gut instinct will only get you so far. You need to see trends in past activity and be able to predict where the organization and its initiatives are heading. Know what actions to take before the numbers show up in the report or appear on the dashboard. Action planning is a valuable exercise that many managers overlook when they define their measures and reports.

To learn how you can get started now with your measurement strategy, read the full article from CLO Magazine.

http://www.clomedia.com/talent.php?pt=a&aid=2786

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Featured Measure: Skills coverage deficits
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What it means: Skills coverage deficits are a diagnostic measure of skill supply and demand representing the percentage of jobs for which inadequate skills coverage exists.

How it’s measured: Job skill profiles (typically ascertained through a job task analysis) identify the required skills to successfully perform job-related tasks. Employee skill assessments determine whether existing workers in those roles have the necessary skills at point in time. Merging the two together, we determine the percentage of jobs for which inadequate skills coverage exists as well as the specific skill gaps for any high deficit jobs. Many organizations will assess the skill level required for the job and the skill level that existing workers hold to produce a more granular deficit analysis. For those getting started, we suggest you simply determine what skills are required (regardless of level) and whether workers have the skill or not (e.g. yes or no scale) as experience-level scales (e.g. novice, intermediate, expert) can be quite objective and tend to over complicate and slow down a skill inventory initiative.

How it’s used: Organizations use the skills coverage deficits to determine skill bench strength and weaknesses in their workforce. Deficit analysis gives organizations insight to where skills need to be reinforced, developed, or redistributed. The resulting gaps help organizations form strategies for mitigating risks in high deficit jobs including planning, budgeting, scheduling, and monitoring of skill gap closure. In reverse, where jobs are oversaturated with skilled workers there may be opportunities to redistribute some workers in areas where gaps and risks exist and a dilution of the originating jobs is not adversely affected.

To learn more about human capital metrics and how you can apply them in your organization, visit www.zeroedin.com

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What measuring really costs?
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What measuring really costs is the $100,000 question. In fact, if you take the costs for internal personnel, tools, consulting, training and the like, it might be right close to $100,000 annualized for organizations. For some it could be more, and for sure, it could be less, but expect to get less. Here are some quick numbers on where the dollars for measurement are typically allocated:

Personnel: 50-100% of a full-time technologist. Typically this resource is an internal person but could be offset by external consulting if the organization does not have access to or headcount for such a resource. This person may be responsible for setting up and managing measurement and evaluation tools, aggregating data and reporting information. Depending on the volume and scope of your measurement initiatives, will determine how much of this person’s time is used. Some organizations may even require more than one person. Average fully loaded cost of a technology resource is about $100,000 annually.

Tools: $10,000-$35,000. These costs represent licensing for evaluation, measurement, and reporting tools. These costs do not represent enterprise level business intelligence solutions, but rather niche tools use in the evaluation, measurement, and reporting of human capital.

Consulting: $15,000-$40,000. External experts add great value to organizations looking to start a measurement initiative. They provide great resources in addition to their advice to help organization formalize a sustainable measurement process. Many experts provide their tools as part of their consulting fees.

Training: $5,000-$15,000. Building the skill sets of your internal personnel is a great investment. Whether it’s providing technical training on new measurement and reporting tools, or conceptual training or certification on measurement models and concepts, giving your resources the knowledge and skills they need to succeed will ensure that they effectively deliver measurement results to you and your stakeholders.

Think about where your spending money in your organization today where you can’t measure the outcomes or results. The returns on measuring will greatly outweigh the costs if you effectively use the results to make good decisions.

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Opinion: Measurement Process vs. Project
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Is measurement best served as a process or a project? I’ve seen it executed both ways and be successful. A good measurement process, like any other, leads to a succinct set of steps that can be easily repeated by following the documented procedures and workflow. Most processes are sustainable by nature, meaning they are designed in an automated fashion to recur over and over in a cyclical manner (e.g. measure, monitor, act, and repeat). For example, measuring learning effectiveness (i.e. learner satisfaction via end of course surveys, knowledge transfer, etc.) is commonly implemented as a process in organizations where tools and resources automate the collection, monitoring, and reporting of results.

A measurement project, on the other hand, is typically a one time or limited time initiative that serves to justify or prove some hypothesis. Measuring the return on investment or ROI of a learning or talent initiative is often performed as a measurement project. Sometimes it’s easier to get started as a project and morph the steps and lessons learned into a standardized process. More commonly, I see organizations investing in pilot measurement projects with the intent of starting small, then growing the initiative into a sustainable process. One of the values here is there is less upfront risk in terms of investment and resources. You could even term it a "pilot process".

In the long run, efficiencies are created through repeatable process and reusable resources. We already see this in other human capital areas like learning asset and course development. Human capital measurement can take a page from that book (pun intended) by instituting repeatable and reusable resources to measure, monitor, and act on the results.

And that’s my opinion …

- Chris Moore

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Contact: Chris Moore, Zeroed-In Technologies
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email: chris@zeroedin.com
phone: 410.242.6611   
web: http://www.zeroedin.com
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