The Service Measurement process has very close and obvious links to the Service Reporting process. Base lining is vital in ensuring that the reports produced are meaningful to those who receive and that they provide value. Without a base line there is no solid foundation upon which to build or compare ongoing reports. These base lines need to be documented, recognized and accepted throughout the company.
There are four fundamental reasons why organizations should monitor and measure:
- Validation
- of previous decisions (both operational and strategic) taken based upon monitoring and measuring
- Direction
- monitoring and measuring determines how the organization moves forward and at what pace
- Justification
- evidence needs to be gathered to determine in what direction to take and more importantly why
- Intervention
- life is never smooth and changes and choices need to be made along the way. Monitoring and measuring enables the journey to be re-planned if necessary if internal or external influences arise.
So why is monitoring and measuring important? Here are a further 3 questions to consider:
- Why is monitoring and measuring being done?
- When do we stop?
- Is anyone actually reading the reports or making use of them?
The answer to the above questions is simple: Do we still need this information? This will determine whether all the effort involved is actually worth the time spent. Numerous organizations request and produce tens maybe hundreds of reports that get reviewed for the first three months but then never get looked at again and become shelf ware.
The whole purpose of Service Measurement is to gather appropriate information and data to enable informed decisions to be made throughout the organization at various levels in order to continually improve.