Capturing and analyzing various business metrics is one of the most powerful tools available to in-house design team leads to better manage their resources and articulate their teams' value proposition to their companies. With these powerful benefits, though, come some equally critical caveats. I have a few insights to share based on recent experiences at my current engagement where we quickly and aggressively adopted new metrics practices.
First, your team will most likely need to adopt new behaviors and practices and build new long-term habits around capturing data (primarily work time). Getting creatives to adopt these tasks is like herding cats--time consuming and painful, but necessary and unavoidable. I know of managers who have employed the carrot approach by awarding gift cards and other small rewards as compliance incentives. To be honest, I took the stick approach. Most members of our team are hourly contractors, and if they didn't enter their time they didn't get paid. We hit 99.9% compliance within the first month.
Correctly assigning the task description to the time being entered is another important aspect of tracking time. Simplicity, restricted options, and constant and effective communication are the keys to success around this practice. As much as possible, the task description should completely describe the task being performed. This can be a challenge when trying to keep the descriptions concise, but I'd recommend erring on the side of title length to ensure there's no confusion as to what task the task name is referring to. We incorporated drop-down menus in our time capture tool with the task lists specific to each team member's role to limit available task choices so that staff could quickly and easily identify the task to assign to their time to. Finally, we sent out numerous communications to the team that included the task names, descriptions and when to employ those task identifiers prior to implementing time capture.
With time capture comes increased visibility into how, on what and when your team is working, and with this data there's an accompanying opportunity to enforce greater accountability. Managing the communication of new productivity expectations should be approached with extreme sensitivity to their potential impact on your group's morale and ability to make appropriate judgment calls.
A specific example is enforcing utilization targets and associated expectations. How your team is made aware that their billable vs. non-billable time is now being monitored can make all the difference in their perception of how and why they are valued and their opinion of management's leadership style. I'd recommend having initial communications around this issue first in person and then with written follow-ups for clarification.
Letting your group know that the utilization targets are annualized and that they are not accountable to hit them on a daily or weekly basis will ease anxiety and resentment. In addition, pointing out how tracking utilization benefits the team by allowing management to adjust new business strategies to ensure the team is fully utilized will go a long way towards minimizing churn and lowered productivity.
As an overall practice, having direct managers remain in constant communication with their team to explain potentially fear-inducing metrics policies and also take their team's temperature so they can give you feedback that will allow you to effectively course correct your change management plan as needed is essential. Another tactic, only communicating information that is absolutely essential for your team to effectively implement your metrics plan and always focusing as much on the "why" as the "what," will ensure that you reap the benefits of the data while avoiding potential pitfalls and negative impacts on morale.
One final note: you need to be on the lookout for unintended perverse consequences of implementing rigorous data capture and metrics practices. One obvious risk is that members of your team will be incentivized to take longer on executing their tasks so that they appear to be more utilized (billable). Establishing efficiency goals and targets by setting time benchmarks for specific tasks can help address this issue.
Another potential impact is staff avoidance of engaging in team-building, collaborative and professional development activities that have long-term benefits but may reduce their utilization numbers in the short term. Education and clarification around the value you place on these areas is the best way to avoid this unintended and unwanted behavior.
Knowing that there will be resistance and unintended responses to implementing metrics and having a plan in place to address that resistance is as necessary to the successful implementation of a metrics rollout as the mechanics and logistics of adopting metrics as a best-business practice.
