See Figure 1. Now that the team has agreed which areas of accountability are important, they must determine what they will measure and how they will measure it. If the measure is already being used, then the baseline measure will simply be where your team is right now on the most recent measurement. When developing measures, it is important to keep in mind that we should remain customer focused. That is, we should be measuring things that are important to our customers' satisfaction.
Many teams focus too much on developing measures that are internally focused.
Even though some of your measures may fall into the internal category, try to make them as few as possible. Keep the focus of measures on outcomes, not work in process whenever possible. For example, in a customer service department, the best measure to focus on is not the number of calls a customer service rep can take in an eight-hour day, but the number of customers who have received a satisfactory resolution of their problem. See Figure 2 for examples of measures for two different areas of accountability. Once a set of effective, meaningful measures has been established, it is time to set goals.