This article is part of the “Turning Insight Into Impact” series from Peak Signal
The approach relates to the HOW segment of the Change compass – head here to read more
The Art of Measurement (Part 1)
Defining Goals and Headline Measures
In our ‘Turning Insight into Impact’ series, we’ve covered the journey from proposing a future service to delivering it from blueprint to reality. Once a new service is live, or as part of a continuous improvement cycle, the focus must shift to a critical question: Is it delivering the intended value?
This brings us to the art of measurement.
Defining the right performance metrics can be a significant challenge. The correct approach depends heavily on context: the type of organisation – be it a service provider, content owner, or technology vendor – and its specific objectives. Furthermore, measurement must adapt to the business’s current state, whether the goal is optimising ongoing quality, establishing a baseline for continuous improvement, or tracking the impact of a major transformation.
This challenge is brought into even sharper focus during a transformation. New service designs and evolving ways of working create new expectations, making robust measurement more critical than ever.
To navigate this complexity, a guiding principle is needed. We advocate for the establishment of a ‘Balanced Scorecard’ – a framework that considers a balance of essential perspectives to provide a holistic view of organisational performance. This framework, in turn, provides a ‘north star’ to guide the identification of meaningful goals, ultimately leading to a comprehensive and interconnected set of metrics that truly reflects the organisation’s health and success.
This article is the first of two dedicated to the art of measurement. Here, we focus on defining clear goals and their top-level measures. Our next article will then explore how to drill down into, and manage, the specific KPIs aligned with them. Together, they provide a proven method for creating an insightful measurement system that drives strategic decision-making and continuous improvement.
Defining the overarching Goals
The first step is to collaboratively define what good performance looks like across the organisation. This process should define success for both ongoing ‘business as usual’ (BAU) operations and for the specific outcomes of a transformation. To ensure alignment and buy-in, it is crucial to bring together stakeholders from across the business to create a shared understanding of priorities.
Steps include –
Step 1
Agree what matters most
A comprehensive measurement framework typically addresses four or five key perspectives. The following four are the most common and provide a strong foundation:
Financial: This perspective assesses commercial viability and health of a cost centre, business function or organisation. It connects all operational and customer-focused activities to the bottom line, ensuring that the service is not just effective, but also sustainable and contributes to business growth.
Customer Experience: This evaluates performance from the outside-in. It focuses on how end users, whether they are commercial clients, internal clients or audience members perceive the value we deliver. As the ultimate arbiter of success, this forces an organisation to look beyond internal metrics to measure what truly matters.
Service Performance: This provides an internal view of the quality, stability, and efficiency of service delivery. As the engine room of organisations, its performance is the foundation upon which the end user experience is built.
Employee Engagement & Development: This crucial perspective addresses the capabilities and motivation of the people delivering the service. A healthy, skilled, and engaged team is the single greatest enabler of financial, customer, and operational success.
For some organisations, different perspectives will prevail – such as innovation, supplier relationships, compliance, community and social responsibility or brand and reputation. The key at this step is to distill what matters most for your organisation.
Step 2
Define the goals
Once the key perspectives are established, the next step is to determine a specific goal for each area. The technique for doing this is simple but powerful: articulate what needs to be achieved in a single, descriptive statement, or frame it as a guiding question.
For the purpose of illustration, we will use an example of a playout managed service provider serving external commercial clients. In this case the statements/questions could be:
| Goal Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Financial | Are we keeping costs as low as possible, enabling us to be commercially competitive and profitable? |
| Customer Experience | Do our customers feel they are getting great service and value? |
| Employee Engagement & Development | Does our team feel they are empowered and equipped to succeed? |
| Service Performance | Are we delivering an optimal service? |
Step 3
Incorporate Transformational Goals
The goals of a transformation may fit neatly into your existing BAU targets, whilst in other cases they will be more discrete. It can be beneficial to call these goals out specifically to ensure they are given strategic focus and remain top of mind. It’s also important to recognise that post-transformation, once changes are embedded into daily operations, these goals may evolve and can be reconsidered within the BAU framework.
Typically, these goals focus on major operational or technological shifts. Building on the example above, examples could include:
- Increase automation
- Simplify the technology estate
- Accelerate speed to market
If these haven’t already been set as part of the Why, expand on this in the same way as the BAU.
| Goal Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Increase Automation | Simplify and harmonise operations by reducing manual touchpoints |
| Simplify the technology estate | Decrease the number of systems to lower support costs and reduce homespun, unsupported integrations |
| Accelerate speed to market | Make it faster, simpler and ultimately cheaper to launch services; enabling a compelling product offering at a competitive price |
Step 4
Consolidate goals and set headline measures
The transformation goals can either be measured as discrete project objectives or, where it makes sense, absorbed into the wider BAU goals. If they are absorbed, we recommend consolidating the objectives into approximately five core goals to maintain sharp focus.
For instance, the transformation goals of ‘Increase Automation’ and ‘Simplify the technology estate’ could be consolidated into a new, fifth strategic goal titled ‘Operational Efficiency’, while the ‘Accelerate speed to market’ transformation goal is absorbed into the Financial goal.
At this stage, a ‘headline measure’ should be assigned to each consolidated goal. It is important to recognise that these are outcome metrics. Think of them like the speedometer in a car: they tell you the final result of your efforts (your speed), but not the story behind how you got there. These headline measures serve two valuable purposes: firstly, they act as a reality check that validates the clarity of the goal description. Secondly, they provide a high-level indicator for reporting while setting a clear direction for the more detailed metrics to come. In the second part of this article, we will build out the rest of the dashboard by exploring the ‘diagnostic gauges’ that explain the performance of your speedometer..
The result might look like this:
| Goal Type | Description | Potential Headline Measure |
|---|---|---|
| Financial | Make our services commercially compelling through lowering operational support costs and enabling faster service launches | Cost per channel |
| Financial | Make our services commercially compelling through lowering operational support costs and enabling faster service launches | Cost per channel |
| Customer Experience | Improve customer engagement and loyalty through proactive service development | Net Promoter Score (NPS) |
| Employee Engagement & Development | Empower and equip our team to prosper and grow | Employee Engagement |
| Service Performance | Deliver first class service availability | Service availability |
| Operational Efficiency | Simplifying and harmonising operations by reducing manual touchpoints and unsupported systems | Manual Interventions per month |
Next steps
With this clear set of goals and headline measures established, we have a solid basis for building out a more detailed measurement system. In the second part of this article, we will explore how to build out the detailed KPIs that bring these goals to life.
In our next article, we examine the art of moving from Goals to Actionable KPIs