Why do you measure? - ITIL Tutorial

- Now that we know what measurements and metrics are and we know that we should limit what we measure due to the resource and cost constraints, we now have another question to consider. Why do we measure things? To answer this question, let's consider the measurement framework and the quadrants it represents. Well, there's really four reasons that we measure things in our organizations. We do this to validate, to influence, to justify, and to intervene. Let's take a look at each of these. When I talk about to validate, the reason we measure things to validate is because our past decisions can be validated based on measuring the achievement against our target and objectives. For instance, let's say I said that I wanted to be more profitable this year. Well, we can measure our outgo, what we spent, and our income, what we're taking in in profit. And when we start measuring those things, we can increase our profit by decreasing our expenses and increasing the amount that comes in as income. When we look at that, that will tell us and validate whether we made a good decision or not in whatever changes we made to try to increase our profitability. That validates that decision. Next, we want to influence. So when we influence, this is when an organization is going to set the direction for the activities and then they set the expectations for the outcomes by defining measurable targets. What I mean by this is when you set up your key performance indicators in your metrics, you're going to say, we want to achieve X, and whatever that X is, that's influencing your organization. If I said I wanted to achieve 100% customer satisfaction, that shows that our organization values our customers. If I said I wanted to set my uptime as 99.999%, that is going to influence a lot of our purchasing decisions on what equipment and what software we're going to use to make sure we're buying highly reliable things that can be able to meet those objectives. And so metrics can be used to influence your way throughout the organization. Another thing they're useful for is to justify. Metrics can be used to justify with evidence or proof that a course of action is required or that the course of action you took was good. We already talked about the one that was good by doing things in the validation. But if we're talking about, I want to think about, should I go left or should I go right, well, based on what we're doing and what metrics I see, I can use that evidence as where we should go. A good example of this is when we think about what the next courses we're going to film. We look at the metrics and we look at past performance. For instance, the whole reason that this course exists is because we were able to justify with the metrics that our previous ITIL courses were very popular. There's some of our most popular courses and therefore we should make more ITIL courses. Because it's popular and we're being profitable doing it and we're helping a lot of students get certified. And so that was a way to justify the expense involved in filming this course. Because every course we film costs us tens of thousands of dollars to make. And so we have to justify those decisions. And we can't just randomly say, I'm going to make a course on X, Y Z. We have to make sure there's a good return on investment. And using our metrics helps us do that. Our fourth way is to intervene. Measurements can be used to preemptively identify a point of intervention including subsequent changes and corrective actions. For example, let's say I started making a new pipeline of courses. Let's say there's a new certification called the XYZ certification. Well, we decide to make one course in the XYZ certification. We see how that does. And we go, oh, that didn't sell very well. Well, we're going to intervene and stop production on the other two, three and four courses that we had planned in that certification and start doing something else. We can turn the ship and go back to where things were profitable and things were good. And so using these measurements can help you preemptively identify that you're going the wrong way, turn your ship around and go the right direction. And so when you're looking at this remember we have four things we can do. We can validate, we can influence, we can justify or we can intervene. And these are the four things that measurement helps us do.