Services – Team Performance Metrics – Part 1 - Best Practices
You’ve staffed the team, everyone is working hard, work is getting done . . . and now the team wants feedback on their collective and individual performance.
At a minimum, there are regular 1:1s happening where projects, clients and career goals are discussed. These sessions likely involve a bit of coaching, cheerleading and general support. That’s a good start, but at some point, performance reviews will be due, recommendations for compensation adjust and promotions will be requested and your team will be prompting you for guidance on their career development progress.
This next series of articles will provide a structured process for defining, implementing, measuring, and expanding performance metrics.
Best Practices:
Defining effective Performance Metrics can be critical motivator for a Services Organization. Well-defined metrics can provide a level of clarity that enables team members more autonomy in their day to day decision-making, can provide management with a consistent way to define (and communicate) successes and course correction and ensure the overall team is aligned with overall company goals.
To start, here are some best practices to consider:
Drive to Qualitative Metrics – A good principal is that remember that anything WORTH measuring can be measured. Many metrics (Utilization, Customer Satisfaction, On Tie Delivery) can, with some systems support, consistent tracking and well-defined expectations can be mapped to a quantified value that can be used to provide a score.
Align with Company/Partner Goals – You ultimately want the team helping the overall company be successful. Ideally, Metrics should clearly tie to overall company goals. Is revenue growth critical? Then on time launches that enable ARR are important? Is Customer Retention critical? Then CSAT is important.
Also consider the goals of partner orgs within the company. If Sales has aggressive number to deliver in terms of booking ensure that (at a minimum) the Services team is not being incentivized to block sales efforts. In some cases, Services can be driven to SUPPORT Sales efforts via metrics (i.e. Bookings Goals in Services).Identify Common Expectations – Most Services teams have a common set of end goals they are trying to achieve. While projects may vary in scope, customers may have different expectations and products may require different skills sets to implement . . . ultimately the objectives should be similar enough to allow consistent metrics across the team.
Allow for Title/Level Differences – Senior team members may have a different set of expectations than early stage team members. In some cases, this can be achieved by new goals (i.e. “Mentoring”). Another approach is by weighting goals by title/level. For example, Utilization may be 85% of a junior team member’s goals . . . where a Senior team member may also be expected to support sales and manage projects.
Don’t Forget About Customer – It can be easy to over-focus on internal metrics and company goals. Ideally, the company has already made a clear statement on the importance of Customers and this should map through to the Services goals, but if this NOT the case ensure there is a measurement for Customer Satisfaction.
Start Simple; You Can Always Expand – Every Services Team is unique and over-engineering a complex set of metrics for the initial roll-out can create significant operational overhead and mixed directions. In most cases, it’s best to start with <3 metrics total. This allows the team to get used the approach, make some initial tuning corrections and ensure alignment. Then, in phase 2, you can introduce more
Avoid “Zero Sum” Systems – In nearly all cases, the team’s performance (and company’s performance) benefits from strong delivery across ALL team members. Effective systems should not “force rank” to create low performers or internal competition will result. If all team members performed well during the period, the system should reflect this.
In our next article, we’ll introduce some of the most common metrics used for Services Incentive plans.
