In our latest blog, we reflected on how following our own advice isn’t always easy. While we advise clients to use metrics to improve performance, we struggled to implement metrics and consistently collect data to ascertain trends and measure effectiveness. Here are three key metrics we have successfully implemented.
- Finance: Burn Rate – Keep track of hours spent on evaluations and other projects, monetize the hours and add other costs (printing, communications, travel etc.). This allows you to compare actual costs versus budget at any point while implementing an evaluation and make adjustments (e.g. spend less on accommodation or less time on analysis). The metric helps to ensure that Khulisa is actually earning a profit (or at least not losing money!).
- Business Development (BD): Bid Rate – measure the success ratio of your bids – we find on average we have to put in three to four proposals per win. This is the quantitative side of the metric. For the qualitative side, ask the client why you either won or lost the bid and analyze the data. Use the data to refine proposal strategies and make decisions about future bids.
- Project Management: Project Tracking Metrics – our project management tracking helps us to stay on track with completing activities and deliverables on time and managing workloads.
Remember collect your data consistently, ensure you analyze the data and finally use the data to drive decision making!
Read more in our blog: A Dose of Our Own Medicine.