Photo of Shelly Sack
Written by
Shelly Sack
Shelly is Manager of Content Programs for AOTMP®

KPIs. We often measure our processes to ensure our objectives are being met. But maybe you can relate to the dilemma of inaccurate, variable, siloed, and just plain hard-to measure data. Further complicating your task is perhaps the KPI a customer requests may not accurately reflect the information they need.

The goal behind tracking KPIs is to gain insight into performance against the objectives trying to be achieved. But you may track a specific KPI that doesn’t measure what you specifically need to know or forget to allow for information sets that may compromise accuracy. As a result, you can find yourself running in circles to fully understand your performance against flawed answers.

Here are just some areas where you can reconfigure your KPIs to reflect a more thoughtful consideration of the resulting metrics.

  1. Telecom expense management: Various nuances to a bill (new services, errors, disconnects) can challenge getting a pure metric to measure key performance indicators (KPIs); understanding the full scope of data is an important practice.
  2. Client satisfaction with reported numbers: When a telecom client asks for a number on claims processed, people might misunderstand what they want to determine. They might actually be searching for something they expected to see occur as a result of the claims being processed.
  3. Network transformation projects: Establishing KPIs such as speed and ability to reach the cloud after an initial test roll-out for a network transformation in early steps. This can provide a benchmark for the second stage of the project to perform against.

It’s important to put a twist on the KPI list. And that is exactly what Denise Davis, director of audit and network transformation projects with Sakon is challenging in her day-to-day operations. When I posed the topic of struggling to capture KPIs, Davis said she felt an immediate understanding with regards to her direct line of responsibilities.

“A client may want to know if we processed a claim,” she said. “What they want to know is different than their ask. They really want to know the results and understand how it affects them.”

David Middleton with General Dynamics Information Technology and AOTMP® member says his team is also forming a new strategy when implementing a network transformation project known as Cloud Interconnect, as outlined above in the third example. The emphasis is on developing a notional design for the initial position.

“We have done our research, chosen a partner, the team has a notional design, and now we need to implement and test,” Middleton said. “Then we will evaluate if any changes are needed before we go into production.”

Adjustments can be made to the KPIs as needed. Remember, the twist mentioned earlier? While it’s encouraged to set some initiatives when beginning a project to measure performance, don’t be afraid to change it if the metric itself is part of the problem. Middleton serves as Director, Compliance & Planning and pointed out some of their measures are valid for the type of performance being tracked, but others have proven challenging to capture and require an ability to adjust how they look at data.

“In our current connectivity to our clouds, we can measure network throughput, latency, overall status — common network KPIs that indicate health. What we have a more difficult time quantifying is our efficiency when scaling out the solution, such as adding additional capabilities within the cloud. There are many steps involved to ensure the configurations are consistent.

“In addition, generating reports to validate our consistency of implementation has been a challenge. The goal here is to have an engineer be able to quickly validate all settings and ensure they are in line with expectations. If not, they will identify the anomaly and take corrective action. We just recently started to visualize this data and that has helped. We are not done but are making progress to visualize our entire footprint.”

In other KPI news, siloed data due to work teams and systems remains a point of frustration among many. Inability to access in a timely manner can delay operational excellence opportunities such as measurable performance across business groups. If you have this solution, there are just a few thousand others like me who would love to hear it!

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