How to Implement Technical Performance Measures
How to Implement Technical Performance Measures
In today’s digitally-immersed world, companies of all sizes must have an ongoing digital transformation strategy. Business leaders should always consider the risks and opportunities surrounding their team’s current technology and new solutions. This tech-forward mindset is often met with resistance, though.
Large-scale technological updates require a great deal of time and effort from all affected parties, and 70% of these sorts of initiatives fail to reach their intended goals.
Implementing technical performance measures is a great way to assuage any hesitation and ensure your project has the desired effect on your organization.
Having the visibility provided by tracking these metrics will allow your team to step in and address any pain points before they become serious roadblocks that derail your initiative.
While the proactivity afforded by technical performance measures sounds appealing, devising an implementation schedule can be a daunting task.
This article will provide you with an outline of how to implement technical performance measures in a manner that will add the most value to your organization without overwhelming you and your team.
Steps to Implement Technical Performance Measures
- Define scope
- Determine inputs
- Track effectiveness
- Use results to guide decisions
1. Define the Scope of Your Measures
As with any network-based implementation project, the first step when implementing technical performance measures is defining the scope you’d like them to address.
Business’ IT infrastructures are growing by the day. With global information and communication technology spending projected to eclipse $5 trillion in 2021, these networks should continue to see expansion.
The breadth of technologies businesses employ makes defining the scope of your technical performance measures an essential early step in the implementation process. As such, you should be sure to explicitly pick a specific technology for which you’d like to track performance.
The statistics you pull could also be rendered useless if they don’t directly pertain to the technologies you’re trying to track. For instance, tracking page loading times is crucial when implementing a new front-end framework for your website.
Still, for a new internal communication platform, unplanned downtime might be a more relevant measure.
Before progressing too far into the implementation process, you and your team should be sure to pick a specialized focus area that isn’t too broad and a set of metrics that is sensible for this specific area.
2. Determine Implementation Inputs
Once you’ve narrowed down and laid out the scope of your technical performance measures project, your next step should be to determine what personnel and technological resources are necessary to launch and track your metrics.
From a technical standpoint, dashboard software such as Tableau or Databox can be beneficial in connecting and visualizing your selected technical performance measures.
Before launching your metrics initiatives, you should explore and test these solutions to see how they fit within your IT infrastructure. Your selected dashboard should allow you to pull and compile data from your systems quickly.
Depending on the expertise and workload of your team, you should also consider hiring a subcontractor or external firm to help with this step in the process. Bringing in a top IT consulting firm can help demystify the data visualization portion of your project.
3. Implement and Track Effectiveness
After putting together a full-scale plan for what technologies to track technical performance measures against and how to track those metrics, you can implement the initiative and begin to analyze data.
Properly tracking your technical performance measures will require you and your team to communicate effectively. The data you gather will have to be analyzed on a pre-set, regular basis. Any affected stakeholders should be looped in to respond to the messages derived from the metrics.
When visualizing your data, your team must focus on trends rather than single data points. It can be tempting to fixate on isolated numbers that look impressive out of context, but only trends will tell the whole story behind the technical performance measures.
Your team should also be flexible in changing which metrics you focus on for a given technology area.
After several periods of tracking data, you should be able to discern if all your technical performance measures are giving you meaningful results that affect your overall strategy. Don't be afraid to update these measures as needed.
4. Use Measures to Guide Digital Transformation
Effective technical performance measures, once implemented, are a great way to track the performance of the technology area of focus. However, a genuinely forward-thinking business will allow the metrics that guide one place to influence its overall digital transformation strategy.
In today’s technology-driven business climate, successful firms look at technological strategy as an ongoing, unified process rather than an isolated series of operations.
Technical performance measures are critical to a healthy digital transformation strategy. Through these statistics, your team may find that while one technology is performing well in isolation, there is a piece missing from or falling behind within the organization’s overall infrastructure.
Through open-mindedness and practical analysis of technical performance measures in one area, you and your team can affect change at a system-wide level.
Technical Performance Measures Are Powerful Tools
Proper technical performance measures are at the heart of any modern business’ technological strategy.
You should commit to applying relevant metrics to a specific technology area, build a valuable framework for tracking and visualizing data, remain proactive in following your selected measures, and allow your findings to drive initiatives throughout the organizational IT infrastructure.
