Sometimes we focus too much on traditional metrics, here is a great post on non financial measurments....

This is a guest post from James Slavet of venture firm Greylock Partners. Slavet’s investments include Coupons.com, Groupon, One Kings Lane and Redfin. Greylock Partners has invested in Facebook, LinkedIn and Pandora..

After years of leading teams and then, at Greylock, watching some of the best startup CEOs in the world, I’ve learned that the most important metrics are often ones you never read about on the income statement or in the financial press.

“If you can measure it, you can manage it” is a business saying that goes way back. Maybe it was Henry Ford who said that, or Peter Drucker? Regardless, most managers only measure outputs, not inputs, which is like telling a Little League team to score more runs, rather than actually explaining how to swing a bat and make contact with the ball. Similarly, most companies measure traffic, revenue or earnings, without considering how to improve the company at an atomic level: how to make a meeting better, or an engineer more productive.

Here are five metrics that great teams should measure:

Metric 1: Flow State Percentage

Jobs that require a lot of brainpower—software programming for instance—also demand deep concentration. You know that feeling when you’re “in the zone,” cranking on something. That is flow, a term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Unfortunately, most of us are constantly interrupted during the day with meetings, emails, texts, or colleagues who want to talk about stuff. These interruptions that move us out of “flow state” increase R&D cycle times and costs dramatically. Studies have shown that each time flow state is disrupted it takes fifteen minutes to get back into flow, if you can get back at all. And programmers who work in the top quartile of proper (ie uninterrupted) work environments are several times more productive than those who don’t.

Ideally programmers and other knowledge workers can spend 30% – 50% of their day in uninterrupted concentration. Most office environments don’t even come close. To get started, ask your engineers to track for a few days their personal flow state percentages: how many hours each day are they in flow, divided by the number of total hours they’re at the office. And then brainstorm ways that the team can move this number up. For example, perhaps there’s a little paper sign at each person’s desk that says “Go Away, I’m Cranking.” Or maybe you have a day where no meetings are allowed. Tom Demarco has written insightfully on the topic of flow.

Metric 2: The Anxiety-Boredom Continuum

Years ago, back when I was younger and cooler, I took a salsa class with my wife-to-be where the instructor said something that really stuck with me. He said that his goal was to keep all of his students in the pocket between boredom and anxiety – but closer to anxiety. In other words, we shouldn’t be so overwhelmed that we break down and give up, but we also shouldn’t be coasting either. He kept the rhythm fast enough so that we were challenged, but not so difficult that we lost the steps completely. And he kept tuning the difficulty level of the class to stretch but not break us.

This same anxiety-to-boredom continuum also applies to managing people. Star performers can get bored easily, and often function best when they’re expected to rise to great challenges. You want expectations to be high, but not completely overwhelming. With this in mind, check in with your employees periodically about where they are on this continuum, while also keeping an eye out for signs of where they stand. If they have low energy, or are showing up late and leaving early, they may be bored. If they’re responding to small setbacks with anger or frustration, or getting sick a lot, they may be pushing too hard.

Metric 3: Meeting Promoter Score

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Author: Tasha Caruso TELUS Talks Business

With so many mobile devices on the market that support various operating systems, it’s often tough to know which will be the best tool to support you and your team.  In series of four posts, we are speaking with Canadian business leaders about how and why they chose not just their device, but the operating system.

As the Executive Vice President for software company Solutions360, John Graham’s path to the iPhone started when he purchased his iPad.

“What struck me was the simplicity of using it, and just how many new ways I was able to expand its use,” says Graham. “It just worked in every new direction that I took it.”

Shortly thereafter he decided to make the switch from his long time commitment to a top competitor to the iPhone 4, and since then, he says he’s never looked back. Read More...

Too often the PSA software market doesn’t do itself any favours in its dealings with customer’s expectations. 

After 12 years working in the industry, in the sales, delivery and support side of the business, I have seen too many examples of value added resellers and manufacturers mismanaging customer expectations in order to close a sale.  And I’m not sure if this is worse, but often times the mismanagement isn’t done on purpose but due to ignorance on the part of what constitutes a successful implementation.  

One of the fundamental elements that is almost always overlooked is the failure to recognize that PSA implementations have very little to do with the software itself.  It’s a given that a good software solution is a prerequisite to a successful PSA transformation, but the reality is the business and organizational issues are hands down the most important things to adequately address when deploying successful PSA systems. Key among those business and organizational issues is user adoption.

In my 12 years of dealing with new customers and discussing their past experiences it is obvious that most VARs and their customers know very little about user adoption. At best it is brought up, but it’s not nearly as simple as industry consultants typically suggest, and it’s certainly more complex and risky than most customers expect.  While most tend to address the issue with a focus on canned training, user adoption is depending on a variety of prerequisites, with user training being just one relatively minor part of the equation.  And further, user training if not done well and within the framework of user adoption being the measure of a successful outcome, it often falls short.  Unfortunately for the misinformed end customer, failing at user adoption will absolutely equate to PSA failure, no matter how well the software is “implemented” in the mechanical sense.

So how can one ensure that their Professional Services Automation Software implementation be successful from a user adoption perspective? Here are three keys to ensuring successful user adoption:

1. Ensure clearly defined business processes. When I’m in a competitive situation I hear all too often the time how VARs suggest that their software or technical consulting teams can define business processes for their customers. I have a huge problem with this statement and it’s a big reason why so many companies fail miserably in their PSA implementations (over 80-percent, according to our independent research). Here is the simple fact: PSA software defines transactions and procedures, and transactions mean nothing without bigger-picture end-to-end business processes.  The business needs to always be considered holistically when looking at individual transactions.  When most software vendors talk about a business map or system design, they are typically referring to designing transactions in the system.  We approach the solution as having three layers; define the transactions, find ways to systemize the transactions and then have the people drive the systems to make them work.  If you attempt to systemize people you’re going to fail.  Without this critical activity and holistic approach in a project, your people will not truly understand the new business processes, what is expected of them, or how to tie together all the pieces of the puzzle in a way that makes your business more efficient and effective. A proper understanding of your business workflow is something that will take months to complete, especially if you want to consider re-engineering your business processes before going live with the software, which we always recommend to our clients.

2. Define clear roles and responsibilities. Once the business processes and supporting workflow transactions are defined, you still need to define employee roles and responsibilities in the new processes and systems. Just because they have been trained to create a work order or manage job costing doesn’t necessarily mean that employees understand their roles and place in the overall process. Most PSA implementations involve significant changes to people’s job roles, so it is important that you facilitate a process and structure for defining, documenting, approving, and rolling out those job roles and changes. Your HR department, management team, and other key stakeholders will need to be involved in this potentially time consuming process. Again, these are things that a horizontally focused PSA vendor is not in a position or qualified to provide.  Years of vertical market focus both on the software and professional services teams are critical for success and to achieve the goals envisioned at the start of the process. 

3. User adoption doesn’t stop at go live. Most PSA project teams are relieved when they cross the finish line of a go-live. Many months have been spent getting the project off the ground, so the last thing anyone wants to do is talk about how to extend the project or make it take longer than it needs to. But the reality is that most user adoption issues are identified after go-live, and most of the benefits realization framework doesn’t kick in until sometime after go-live, so defining go-live as the project finish line is a common misguided assumption.  An effective user adoption and organizational change management framework will ensure that your people are not only prepared to adopt the system at the time of go-live, but also ensure that they continue to improve their performance in the weeks and months after go-live. This incremental investment in time and money after go-live has returns that exceed the investment multiple times over, but most organizations fail to recognize this need.

The good news is that these three factors are included in any effective organizational change management plan, including the methodology and tools we use at Solutions360. We have a very well-defined and structured way of maximizing user adoption throughout the PSA implementation and after go-live, and the corresponding results are often the difference between implementation success and failure.

This is not some pie in the sky idea. It's a hard-hitting business growth tactic. Obsess (yes, obsess) over how you can add more value to more people and the revenues will take care of themselves.

Things to ask yourself before signing the bottom line

Before you make the commitment to any professional services automation software, you first need to answer several questions about what your organization needs and wants to accomplish as a result of implementing a software solution.  The answers will help you best determine the right solution and the specific functionality you will require to reach your goals.

1. Does the management team support the project?  Were they involved in identifying problem areas in the existing business processes?  Were they part of the discussions on how to best roll-out the software and how to measure the results?  Are the department heads aware of what will be expected from them during the roll-out?  Including all these decisions and discussions with your management team will go a long way to ensuring you have a good level of buy-in.
2. Have you identified the subject matter experts for each department?  They will be the best people to document your existing processes and where there is room for improvement.  They will also be best to scrutinize the new best practices and how they will work in your business during the analysis phase of the roll-out.  They will be the front line for measuring the benefits as a result of using the software.
3. Who will be your project manager? One person; either an existing staff member or an outside consultant will be in charge of managing the project along with their counterpart at the software company.  They should be part of the selection process and coordinate the demonstrations and help with the decision criteria. 
4. What are the specific, high-impact problems you need to address with the software?  For example; you may need to shorten the billing cycle on projects and service calls, you may need to optimize inventory levels, better manage prices lists and vendor inventory information, track time more accurately or improve utilizations rates, the list goes on, but it's important to pick a hand full that will have the highest impact on your business and really drill down on those.  There will be many other benefits as well, but you can't focus on them all and still implement the software in a reasonable amount of time.
5. What are the goals and metrics you will use to measure the business results?  What key performance indicators (KPIs) do you use now?  Start with those and then benchmark status quo and then again at 3 months, 6 months and a year after going live to check on the progress of improvements.  There will likely be many more things you can track after you start to use the software.
6. What are the specific features that people need to increase their productivity?  Ask your team for their input and pose those features to your vendors to see what functionality or access to data they can provide to solve the problem.
7. What best practices are the vendors offering; either built into the software or through the way the implement the software with their professional services team.
8. Are there other considerations such as multi-currency, multi-company, niche market expertise that can be leveraged.  Where is your business going?  Does the vendor have depth in your market as far as their customer base?
9. How flexible is the software design?  More than ever businesses are changing, consolidating, diverging, markets are changing, customer needs are changing.  Does the software you are looking at have the ability to change to address these unknowns?
10. How scalable is the software?  If you have 75 users today, what will you have in 3 years, 500?  Will you have to forklift a vendor's software through that growth line or will it accommodate you and still be a good fit?

These questions are just a sampling to help you start the process of vetting out various solutions to help you achieve your business goals.