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1

Productivity Measurements And Telecommuting


 Business/Management 2008-01-30
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Over the years, the improved channels of telecommunication have paved the way for an increase in number of Telecommuting jobs. Telecommuting occupations are not your typical office work and that is why, it has become a focus of productivity measures issues. There are a lot of myths that surround telecommuting and Productivity Measurements. Some say that measuring productivity is much more difficult in telecommuting rather than in regular office work.

Before going forward, let us first individually define what Productivity and what Telecommuting is. Productivity (in Economics) refers to the amount of output produced in a specific amount of time. In a factory or office setting, this can easily be computed by dividing the number of units of output with the time spent to produce them. For example, an office worker is given the task to compile kits for the participants of a lecture. He was able to compile 25 kits in 1 hour, and that becomes his productivity rate.

Quantitative data is more easily translated into productivity rates rather than qualitative data. On the other hand Telecommuting (otherwise known as working from home) is form of work where the employee works on his or her own schedule. It is called telecommuting because the time and process of commuting to and from the work place are replaced by links of telecommunication. A few of the most popular telecommuting tasks is Medical Transcription and Insurance Underwriting.

The issue that lies between Productivity measurement and Telecommuting are claims saying that Productivity measurement is harder to achieve than with regular office work. This is claimed to be the major downfall of telecommuting. Because of this, employer supposedly has no hold on the productivity of their personnel who work form home.

However, that is really not the case. Productivity Measurements are still easily achievable with Telecommuting Jobs. The rate telecommuting employee works, is the same with every project that he/she receives. A Medical Transcriptionist may complete transcription of 5 files in an hour. No matter how many hours a day a medical transcriptionist chooses to work, his or her hourly rate is still the same.

Another myth about productivity measurement and telecommuting is that an employer has no hold on how much an employee works on a set number of days. This is contradicted by the fact that employers enforce deadlines that a Telecommuting employee must adhere to. In example, an Underwriter is given 10 insurance policies to process in a span of 4 days. It is of no consequence to the employer how his or her Underwriter divides the task over 4 days as long as it is completed within the set number of days.

Telecommuting is a practice that will undoubtedly continue to grow. Despite early fears that it may not be a as easy to regulate and measure as regular office work, it has been proven that it is not so. That is the reason why employers should not shy away from hiring telecommuting personnel because they can still measure and regulate their productivity rate despite not having set office hours.

2

Practical Measurements For Software Testing


 RTG Marketing Computer/Software 2007-03-29
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Every software development company focuses on developing quality software. The only way to track the software quality is evaluating it at every stage of its development. It requires some kind of metrics, which is obtained through effective testing methods. Each stage of software testing is effectively monitored for the software QA.

1. Software measurements are used for:

2. Deriving basis for estimates

3. Tracking project progress 4. Determining (relative) complexity

5. Understanding the stage of desired quality

6. Analyzing defects

7. Validating best practices experimentally

Here, some software testing metrics are proposed for black box testing that has real world applications. It discusses:

Importance of software testing measurement

Different techniques/processes for measuring software testing

Metrics for analyzing testing

Methods for measuring/computing the metrics

Advantages of implementing these metrics

These metrics helps in understanding the inadequacies in different software QA stages and finding better correcting practices.

What is measurement and why it is required?

The process of assigning numbers or symbols to attributes of real world entities for describing them according to defined rules is called measurement.

For developing quality software, several characteristics like requirements, time and effort, infrastructural cost, requirement testability, system faults, and improvements for more productive resources should be measured.

Measuring software testing is required:

1. If the available test cases cover all the system’s aspects

2. For tracking problems

3. For quantifying testing

Choose the suitable metrics:

Several metrics can measure software-testing process.

Here, the following types of metrics are identified:

Base metrics:

These raw data are collected in a testing effort and applied in formulae used to derive Calculated Metrics.

The Test Metrics comprise of the Number of

Test Cases Passed, Failed, Under Investigation, Blocked, Re-executed and Test Execution Time.

Calculated metrics:

They convert the Base Metrics data into useful information. Every test efforts must implement the following Calculated Metrics:

% Complete

% Defects Corrected

% Test Coverage

% Rework

% Test Cases Passed & Blocked

% Test Effectiveness & Efficiency

% 1st Run Failures

% Failures

Defect Discovery Rate

Defect Removal Cost

Measurements for Software Testing

The corresponding software testing process in software development measures each step for ensuring quality product delivery.

1. Software Size:

The amount of functionality of an application determines this and is calculated by

Function Point Analysis

Task Complexity Estimation Methodology

2. Requirements review:

Before software development, the Software requirement specifications (SRS) from the client are obtained. It must be:

Complete

Consistent

Correct

Structured

Ranked

Testable

Traceable

Unambiguous

Validate

Verified

The Review Efficiency is a metric that offers insight on the review quality and testing.

Review efficiency=100*Total number of defects found by reviews/Total number of project defects

3. Effectiveness of testing requirements:

It is measured by maintaining Requirement Trace-ability matrix and specification of requirements, which should have:

SRS Objective, purpose

Interfaces

Functional Capabilities

Performance Levels

Data Structures/Elements Safety

Reliability

Security/Privacy

Quality

Constraints & limitations

Next comes the updating of the crucial requirement trace-ability matrix or RTM, which determines the number and types of tests.

While measuring the mapping of test cases, the number and priority of requirement it tests, its execution effort and requirement coverage must be determined.

The Requirement compliance factor (RCF) measures the coverage provided by the test cases to one or set of requirement(s).

Mathematically, RCFj=?(Pi*Xi)/(maxXi)*(?Pi)i=1

Where,

j is a set of requirements and (j=1-m);

Xi=2, if the test case (say Tj) tests requirements Ri completely, =1, if it tests partially,

=0, if otherwise. Effectiveness=RCFj/Ej where Ej=Time required for executing a test case

4. Evaluating estimation accuracy

Relative error=(A-E)/A where E is estimate of a value and A is actual value.

For a collection of estimates, the mean RE for n projects is

__ n RE=1/n?REi i=1

For a set of n projects, the mean magnitude of RE (MRE) is

___ n MRE=1/n?MREi i=1

Of a set of n projects, an acceptable level for MRE is less than 0.25.

If K is the number of projects whose mean magnitude of relative error is less than or equal to q, then the prediction quality pred(q)=K/n

5. Measurement of Efficiency in testing process

In software testing, we must keep tabs on what we had planned and what we have actually achieved for measuring efficiency. Here, the following attributes play major roles: -

Cost: The Cost Variance (CV) factor measures the risk associated with cost.

CV=100*(AC – PC)/PC, AC=Actual Cost, PC=Planned/Budgeted Cost.

Effort: Effort Variance (EV) measures effort.

EV=100*(AE – PE)/PE (AE=Actual Effort, PE=Planned Effort)

Schedule: Schedule Variance (SV) is important for project scheduling.

SV=100*(AD-PD)/PD where AD=Actual duration and PD=Planned duration.

Cost of quality: It indicates the total effort expended on prevention, appraisal and rework/failure activities versus all project activities.

Prevention Effort=Effort expended on planning, training and defect prevention. Appraisal Effort=Effort expended on quality control activities.

Failure effort=Effort expended on rework, idle time etc.

COQ=100*(PE + AE + FE)/Total project effort.

Product -

Size variance: It is the degree of variation between estimated and actual sizes. Size Variance=100*(Actual Software Size–Initial Estimated Software Size)/Initial Estimated Software Size

Defect density: It is the total number of defects in software with respect to its size.

Defect density=Total number of defects detected/software size Mean Time Between Failures: MTBF is the mean time between two critical system failures or breakdowns.

MTBF=Total time of software system operation/Number of critical software system failures.

Defects: Defects are measured through:

Defect distribution: It indicates the distribution of total project defects. Defect Distribution=100*Total number of defects attributed to the specific phase/Total number of defects.

Defect removal effectiveness: Adding the number of defects removed during the phase to the number of defects found later approximates this.

Benefits of implementing metrics in software testing:

Improves project planning.

Understanding the desired quality achieved.

Helps in improving the processes followed.

Analyzing the associated risks.

Improving defect removal efficiency.

ReadyTestGo is a professional ( http://www.readytestgo.com/readytestgo.htm ) Software Testing Company ( http://www.readytestgo.com/services.htm ) Outsourcing QA . For more details, please contact marketing@readytestgo.com


3

Correlation Measurements with Microsoft Excel


 Stephen Nelson Finance/Investing 2008-01-10
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Excel provides useful statistical functions for measuring correlation between two variables.

As a reminder, the benefit of using a correlation coefficient to measure the relationship between two variables as opposed to using covariance is that the unit of measurement doesn’t matter.

But a caution: Remember that correlation does not show causation. That is, you could easily show that as the number of ice cream cones consumed increases during a year, so does the number of drownings. But this does not mean that eating ice cream causes people to drown—more likely, these variables are both independently related to another variable—that of temperatures. Correlation is symmetrical, so you get the same coefficient if you switch the variables. Don’t calculate a correlation coefficient if you manipulated one of the variables. Use linear regression instead.

CORREL

You use the CORREL function in Excel to determine whether two data sets are related, and if so, how strongly. The correlation coefficient ranges from +1, indicating a perfect positive linear relationship, to –1, indicating a perfectly negative linear relationship. To calculate a correlation coefficient for a sample, Excel uses the covariance of the samples and the standard deviations of each sample. To use the CORREL function in Excel, just select the two sets of data to use as the arguments and use the following syntax:

=CORREL(data set 1,data set 2)

For example, if you have a set of preliminary test scores for a sample of employees in column A and a set of performance feedback scores in column B, as shown in Figure 4-6, and you want to find out whether they’re related and if so, how strongly, you can use Excel to find the correlation coefficient for the samples.

The function returns the value 0.87, indicating that the sets are positively related (as the value of one goes up, the value of the other also increases), but the relationship isn’t perfect.

PEARSON

The Pearson product moment correlation coefficient function, PEARSON, uses a different equation for calculating the correlation coefficient. This formula doesn’t require the computation of each deviation from the mean. Still, the correlation coefficient ranges from +1, indicating a perfect positive linear relationship, to –1, indicating a perfectly negative linear relationship. The PEARSON function uses the following syntax:

=PEARSON(data set 1,data set 2)

Using the PEARSON function on the data shown in Figure 4-6 to compute the correlation coefficient returns the same value as the CORREL function does.

RSQ

The RSQ function calculates the square of the Pearson product moment correlation coefficient through data points in the data sets. You can interpret the r-squared value as the proportion of the variance in y attributable to the variance in x. The RSQ function uses the following syntax: =RSQ(data set 1,data set 2)

About the author: Seattle CPA Stephen L. Nelson wrote the bestselling book, MBA's Guide to Microsoft Excel, from which this short article is adapted. Nelson also writes and edits downloadable do-it-yourself incorporation kits that businesses and investors can use for setting up an Massachusetts incorporation or an Michigan incorporation .


4

Six Sigma And The Simplicity Of Measurements


 Tony Jacowski Business/Management 2007-11-27
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Misconceptions About Six Sigma Measurements

The word Six Sigma has given rise to many misconceptions among the business community. This starts with the measurements that the Six Sigma team collects for devising a Six Sigma strategy. Black Belt Six Sigma professionals create further complications by using innumerable complex charts, graphs, diagrams and jargon to explain their clients about the same. More often than not, the clients complain that they get so dumbfounded and overwhelmed by drawing graphs and charts that they don't have the time to sit back and analyze the whole situation properly and improve fault areas.

Purpose Of The Measurement

In the interest of saving more time and reducing complications while collecting your data, you can first try out defining the purpose of collecting measurements. The main purpose behind collecting measurements is to guide, forewarn and inform. Let's discuss these points in detail:

-Guidance helps in correcting and directing the course of flight while your business is running.

-Measurement also forewarns the implementing group about any potential problems like trends or vacillation on control charts.

-Measurements also help the customers, suppliers or the leaders of any business by informing them about the progress made.

Now that you are aware of the purpose for which you should be collecting measurements you need to analyze the situation once again. Check out measurements that aren't useful for any of the above mentioned three purposes. Do you really need to retain them, or can some other measurements can be used in its place?

For Unnecessary Measurements You Can Do The Following:

-Start suspending the information that is questionable and if any department later asks for that particular information, make sure that you ask them how they are using that particular information and if some other measurement will serve the purpose.

-If the suspended measurement is not resurrected in two to three months then delete it altogether from your database.

-Scan your database properly to find out those "vital few measurements of failure" that everyone relies on to make improvements and decisions. These are defects and they delay the process and increase the cost of implementation, they should be suspended immediately.

-Take special note of measurements of success like profit and ROI. They are quite useful in the implementation process.

Things To Keep In Mind While Collecting Measurements:

After discussing the purpose and unnecessary measurements, the question arises how to create one's own process measurement. Given below are four tips that will help you in creating your own process measures:

-Define what is significant for your business.

-Map the cross-functional process to deliver these results.

-Identify the critical tasks and capabilities required for completing the process fortuitously.

-Design those measures to track the critical tasks and capabilities.

Also Keep In Mind The Most Common Mistakes That Are Done While Measuring:

-Collecting unnecessary piles of data instead of using balanced scorecard to identify the few vital ones.

-All that data will be considered inaccurate, late or unreliable that is collected after the expiry of real time.

-Collecting measurements to meet a target instead of trying to understand the process.

-Stop your Six Sigma team from following the principle of one-size fits all (i.e. a measurement too broad or specific is being used for calculating all parameters).

-Don't trust a measurement blindly. Make sure that there is evidence that confirm the source of the measurement.

-Don't collect your measurements on the basis of a micrometer vs. yardstick approach i.e. measuring unimportant things and ignoring the important ones.

Always use your data to learn something and make things better. If your employees collect unnecessary data the instead of punishing them try to fix the process. Hopefully all the above mentioned points will help to streamline your measurement process, saving a lot of time and resources.


5

Are Your Measurements Making You Look Bad?


 Donald Mitchell Business/Business 2008-05-04
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Most people view the measuring process too narrowly. When they do, they can look pretty foolish.

Here\'s an example: A corporate planner went to a seminar given by corporate strategist Peter Drucker. The planner asked Drucker to pick the best single measure of corporate performance. Drucker replied, \"My dear sir, you obviously know nothing. There is no single measure of corporate performance that is any good. Use them all and try to develop new ones, and each will teach you something you need to know.\"

Drucker\'s point was that measurements are highly subjective and imperfect. Would-be stallbusters are going to need lots more measures.

Tailor Your Measurements to Fit

Measurements may need to be improved with adjustments. For instance, farm tractors cost a lot more now than they did in the 1930s, but they also do a lot more. If you measure cost per tractor, it looks like productivity declined. If you measure by cost per acre plowed in inflation-adjusted dollars, the cost of plowing has gone down substantially.

Feedback Nourishes Learning

It\'s not enough to measure. You also have to learn from what the measurements tell you. Then, when you can access information that competitors lack, you can sneak ahead.

Here\'s an example: Dell Corporation leads in personal computers and gains its orders through direct sales over the telephone and the Internet. Its competitors sell through wholesalers, value-added resellers, and stores. Dell is learning moment by moment what features its customers most want.

Competitors have to use indirect, after-the-fact measurements to estimate what Dell already knows. Dell can be out testing a new insight from daily measurements long before the competitors even know about the new customer need.

With each iteration of this feedback, Dell\'s knowledge moves further ahead of competitors. As a result of learning based on powerful measurements, Dell was able to steam ahead of all its well-known global competitors despite Dell\'s humble beginnings in Michael Dell\'s college dormitory room.

STALLBUSTERS

Use Measurements to Improve Your Personal Effectiveness

Ask yourself the following questions to better allocate your time and efforts:

1. How could I avoid having to do the least productive tasks at all and get better results?

2. How else could I have gotten these tasks done to get better results in less time?

3. How could I delegate these tasks to others for better results?

4. How could I inexpensively automate these tasks and meet my purposes?

5. When was I effective?

6. Why was I effective then?

7. When was I ineffective?

8. Why was I ineffective then?

9. How much time am I spending on time wasters?

10. How could I better spend the time I use on time wasters?

11. What will be the benefits to me and others of spending my time in these more productive areas?

Use Measurements to Improve the Effectiveness of Others

After you have acted on the answers to your personal improvement questions, you will be prepared to be credible as a helpful coach to others, especially with the answers to the following questions:

1. How can you interest other people in measurements?

2. How can you help others set up and use helpful measurements?

3. How can the message about the value of properly using measurements be spread even further?


6

Common Mistakes When Using Customer Service Measurements


 Sam Miller Business/Management 2007-12-18
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If you want to further please and serve your customers, it is imperative that you determine the level of their satisfaction in products and services your business provide. This is a very basic transaction when setting customer-business relations. Through the years, companies have been recognizing the fact that the basic key to their success is to get to know customers better and strive to satisfy and serve them well.

Through the years, companies have been actively adopting customer service measurements in aim of gauging the level of customer satisfaction. However, experts and company research aficionados attest that there are usually misconceptions and misrepresentations when doing such efforts. Thus, it is advisable that you recognize and familiarize yourself with the usual flaws or mistakes when performing and using customer service measurements. Those commonly committed errors are as follows.

- Customer service measurement covers inappropriate population. Before performing customer service measurements, it is essential to target the study on appropriate customers. The survey should be administered on actual customers who know and use the products and services well instead of people who do not even know the products or the brand itself. Also, it is important to determine and set the demographics of the potential respondents to the study. Focusing on customers with higher purchasing power would be more advisable.

- The customer service measurement program does not cover sufficient volume of respondents. When determining customer satisfaction level, it is advisable that your business strive as hard to cover a bigger percentage of customers. You simply cannot determine satisfaction level based on just a few of the customers. In statistics, a 90% minimum or greater level of confidence with a 10% error rate is ideal and lower than that could render the measurement inappropriate and ineffective.

- The customer service measurement is based on an inaccurate hypothesis. Look at the questions employed. Are they appropriate? Will the questions solicit answers that would measure customer satisfaction level? If not, you should look at the original and applied assumptions and see if there are modifications or changes needed. Customer service measurements would render futile if the basic concepts and assumptions are not appropriate in the first place.

- The customer service measurement is using ineffective or technical words. The common mistake among different customer service measurements is that such studies use vocabularies that are not easily understandable. Remember that technical terms and jargons might seem too common for you, but for your customers, they might not be too familiar with such words. Misunderstandings on words would surely arouse discomfort among customer-respondents of such customer service surveys.

- The terms used are overly generalized. If the assumptions and questions are also general instead of specific, the customer service measurement would surely be ineffective.

Time and attention should be particularly allotted if you are to run a customer service measurement program. You should bear in mind that the data you would be attaining from such surveys would be essential in gauging the level of satisfaction in your business' products and services.


7

Performance Measurements for a Sales Call Center


 Ty Price Business/Sales 2007-09-21
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There are many measurements used to determine the performance of a particular call center. Outstanding performance is vital because companies spend a lot of money on advertising and they need a good sales center to close as many deals as possible to boost their ROI. Satisfactory customer service is also very important to call center managers and to the companies that these call centers support. In this article we will discuss the common performance measurements of agents and the significance of each measurement.

1. Delays or hold times of callers: This is pretty straight forward. How long is a prospect or customer on hold before they receive assistance? Many companies now alert callers to their expected wait time, so they can choose to stay on the line and wait or call back at a less busy time. This greatly reduces the number of angry callers, because callers are informed and know what to expect in terms of weighting time.

2. The average talk time: This is a measurement of the amount of time actually spent talking to the caller. Agents want to be able to help as many customers as possible, but there must be a healthy balance between adequately helping the customer and helping as many customers as possible.

3. The average handling time: This is a measurement of the total amount of time spent on the phone by the customer. It includes the customers holding time as well. Call centers don’t want to unnecessarily take up a great deal of a caller’s time.

4. The number of calls handled by an agent every hour: This is simply a measure of an agent’s proficiency.

5. The amount of time a customer spends on hold while being helped by an agent: This is a measurement of how long it takes for an agent to do his or her job. Constantly places callers on hold to get information might be a sign that the agent needs more training.

6. The percentage of complete call resolution. This is a measurement of the percentage of times that an agent solves the customer’s problem or concern, the first time the customer calls in.

7. The percentage of hang ups: Because this is often related to long waiting times, it sends a warning that the call center might not be adequately staffed.

8. The percentage of time that agents are idle: This may be an instance of a lazy agent or simply an over staffing problem.

By keeping track of these performance measures, call centers can make sure they are effectively meeting their clients’ needs, and providing their clients’ customers with the proper support. Call center managers couple these quantitative measurements with qualitative ones by listening in on customer-agent phone calls. They listen for things like: Is the agent using the right tone of voice? Is he or she following the script correctly? Are objections being overcome? Is quality service in general being rendered? It is the responsibility of the call center manager to work closely with agents and change structures or policies in order to improve service.


8

Post-Exercise Pulse Measurements Provide Low Estimates


 Dick Moss Recreation Sports/Other sports and recreation 2008-04-20
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It is common practice for exercisers to take their heart rate after a bout of exercise. Whether running a track interval or performing an aerobics routine, this method is frequently used to monitor the intensity of exercise.

If you are part of an exercise group, common procedure is to wait until everyone has located their pulse (often 15 seconds or so) then to time six, 10 or 15 seconds while everyone counts their own heart beats. You then multiply by the appropriate number (10, 6 or 4, respectively) to arrive at a beats-per-minute value.

However, research has shown that this procedure underestimates heart rates because of the time-lag after the cessation of exercise. In fact, heart rates drop very quickly after exercise ends. This is particularly true for trained athletes.

MANUAL PULSE MEASUREMENT STUDY
A study at the University of Texas at Austin investigated manual heart rate measurement methods by comparing them to actual heart rates as measured by an ECG. The subjects performed exercise sessions at 70% or 85% of their max heart rate. They waited 15 seconds after the end of the session, then counted their pulse for 15 seconds and multiplied by four to get their beats-per-minute count.

At the same time, an ECG measured their actual heart rates at three different times: during the last 10 seconds of exercise; in the first 15 seconds after exercise; then 15 seconds after that.

The manual measurements and the ECG results were then compared.

FINDINGS
The study revealed several things:

1. Both ECG and manual measurements - if taken after the exercise ended - underestimated the heart rate reached during the final 10 seconds of the exercise session.

2. Even the ECG taken immediately after exercise, yielded a heart rate that was 7-9 beats per minute lower than the during-exercise rate. This is because heart rates drop dramatically once exercise ends - especially for trained athletes.

3. The longer the wait before taking a pulse, the less accurate the measurement.

4. Manual methods for measuring pulse rates were fairly accurate, although the radial (wrist) method was less accurate at higher heart rates than the cartotid (neck) method. The radial method yielded results that were too low by about 10 beats per minute.

CONCLUSIONS
1. The best way to measure exercise heart rate is by measuring it during exercise. Using a heart rate monitor is best.

2. You can measure manually, post-exercise, as long as you add a correction factor (see below). Measuring at the carotid pulse is generally most accurate, as long as you do not press too hard, which can stimulate the carotid sinus reflex and lower the heart rate.

3. The sooner you can take the measurement, the more accurate it will be.

4. A six-second or 10-second measuring period will probably be more accurate than a 15-second period because they give the heart less time to recover.

CORRECTION FACTOR IF COUNTING PULSE RATES AFTER EXERCISE
If heart rate is measured after exercise, either manually or with a heart rate monitor:

1. Add 10 beats per minute if measured within 10 seconds.

2. Add 20 beats per minute if measured after 15 seconds.

These are ballpark numbers, but you cannot expect field measurements to be exact. To get a practical read on levels of exertion, it is best to combine heart rate estimates with your own feedback on perceived exertion.

Reference: Allison DeVan, Barbara Lacy, Miriam Cortez-Cooper, Hirofumi Tanaka, Post-exercise palpation of pulse rates: its applicability to habitual exercisers Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 15:177-181, 2005.


9

Custom dress is made to your measurements


 ebet sanders Home Family/Home Family 2007-11-28
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First and foremost, as its name suggests, custom dress is made to your measurements, your form and your physique. It is made especially for you. Once you have experience worthy of a custom shirt, it is impossible to return to off-the-shelf shirt that is somehow never the right one.

Selection
Even if you wear a 16/34 off the shelf liner, the choice is still limited. The stores offer rarely scope of tissue that you find from your shirt manufacturer of custom, where hundreds of fabrics in different weights, the characteristics and qualities are abundant in your size.

Style
When was the last time you were able to choose from a variety of collar, cuffs, pockets and styles fronts, as a wide spread collar, cuffs french angle before or sport? Or for that matter, why not something very special, like a black shirt with white collar and white cuffs? All this is possible with a custom dress shirt.

Proportion
What if your neck is larger in proportion to his body, where the rest of the shirt is like a tent? But you can never find the right length sleeve? With a tailored dress shirt, you don t have to be put in place for that any more ... You can enjoy a comfortable shirt well equipped for the price of a shirt off the shelf.

Quality
Great work, tissues and are the hallmark of a tailored dress shirt. Imagine collars and cuffs that remain firm and crisp. Want to know the secret? Custom built dress shirts are 20 dots per inch compared to a trade dress shirt that has only 12.

Individuality
Taking all these points into consideration, your shirt tailor is as individual as your own signature. There is not another like anywhere!

Value
When you consider all the benefits, a custom dress shirt is really the best value of all, a much better all made and, in some cases, even cheaper than the cost designer shirts.

For two decades Janine Giorgenti devoted his life to the development of high technology to create a professional image. She is a pioneer top designer clothing, image and wardrobe consultant and a dynamic speaker.

Recognized as an expert in the psychology of color and a veteran designer Seventh Avenue, Janine helps clients significantly improve their professional appearance. His scientific approach applies to improving the image of the innovations of the largest clothing experts to each cabinet.

10

Web Traffic - Measurements and Other Essentials


 jeremy gislason Internet Business/Internet Marketing 2007-04-16
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After thorough research and consideration, you decided to put up an online business. Careful Internet marketing has been executed flawlessly and without much difficulty. You have your URL name. Your web site is very appropriate for your business and very attractive, too. You've done every search engine optimization technique you have read. Now, you wait... anticipating any site hits.

How many hits is your web site getting? How many products or ad spaces have you sold? How many visitors are going to your site? Are your links effective? Your mind is racing and these are the questions that have been bugging you since you started. One thing's for sure, you can glide through the discussion on Web traffic and site hits without knowledge of the following:

Definition

Web site traffic is the amount of visitors to your site and the pages they visit. It is the amount of data sent and received, which makes up the bulk of Internet traffic. It is important for you to monitor what are the pages most visitors like and their trends. It is vital that you understand what people are getting from it.

Web Traffic Measurements

It is important for you to know the metrics of web traffic because it is part of your marketing tactic. It is for you to understand the quality of visitors and to target the needs of your consumers. Profits and future dealings with partners will be based on their referrals.

A web hit is generated when a file is seen. A page view is when a visitor requests a page within the web site. The information collected are the following:

(a) number of visitors (b) number of page views for each visitor (c) duration of a user's visit (d) duration a page is viewed (e) most popular pages (f) most requested entry page (g) most requested exit page and (h) the source of links that lead to your web site.

There are various methods of measuring web site traffic. These include:

a. Server logs

All files that are requested are logged on a web server. It can be performed by the web server itself or you can use a customized software that records the requests for you. Advantages includes vital information updates, such as the popularity of the site and patterns of activity. The web site controls the logs. However, some information are lost because it cannot monitor activity outside of the server.

b. Panel Survey

A company is hired to pick a random volunteer to be part of a panel. A device is planted in their computer to record Internet activity. This is accurate because it can also determine the duration of page views. However, the disadvantage is that it is done in the home and the usual consumers are in the work place.

c. Browser Analysis

This is done by inserting a web tag in each page of the web site that will run once the user goes to the page. However, the privacy of the user is an issue and each item should be tagged, which could slow down traffic.

Regulate Web Traffic

Like any business, the consumers opinions and view are highly regarded. The amount of hits and web traffic will help you see possible mistakes and what the consumer really wants. This is your chance to improve your marketing tactics. It is in your hands if the web site increases, decreases or maintains the amount of traffic it gets. It is also vital that you protect some parts of your web site by allowing only authorized people to view them.

A good marketing strategy may increase web site traffic. This can be done by advertising or placement of your site on search engines. But placement only is not sufficient. Your web site should appear on the first page of the results page. Most people often do not bother going through the next page. As your web site is ranked lower, it diminishes the chance that someone will go through your site. Try using promotions and pop up ads to increase your web popularity. You can also trade links with other web sites.

Overload of Web Site Traffic

It is definitely devastating to learn that after months of waiting, your site had few hits. It is bad for business. However, it is also difficult if your web site is so popular that it causes overload to the web traffic. Too much traffic can prevent or slow down access to your site.

A sudden popularity of a site, for example, being a target of a news and email campaign, can cause web site traffic. Many sites had been forced to close due to sudden demand. Some were forced to resell private label rights.

It is important for any business to know what your customer needs. Making them happy will earn repeated visit to your web site. Investigating and understanding their concern is an ultimate factor to making a business successful. Making extra effort in getting web traffic can increase profits and will reap you huge benefits in the end.

Jeremy Gislason is a leading expert on membership sites, marketing and online business. For more Online Traffic Strategies, Tips and Information visit MarketingExplosion.com Website URL http://www.MarketingExplosion.com


11

Checking Your Weight Loss Measurements for Long Term Success


 Jude C Wright Health Fitness/Weight Loss 2008-01-25
View Detail
You know that you should be checking your weight and body measurements but how often and how do it? Tracking this information will help you decide if you are still on track or if you need to make adjustments in your diet or exercise.

The first thing that you should be doing is writing down everything you eat a food diary. When you write down what you eat, you will be able to figure out if you are overeating or if you are eating too many snacks or fatty goods.

You should weigh yourself every morning before breakfast. This will keep you motivated while you are losing weight and it will alert you that you will need to adjust your diet if you are gaining weight. The best time to weigh yourself is when you first get up in the morning. Weigh yourself at the same time every day to get the most accurate reading.

You do not need to take your measurements every day. Take your body measurements weekly. You may even opt to take your measurements every other week so that you can see a real difference. You will want to measure at least your waist, busted or chest, and hips.

Both diet and exercise are important to meeting your weight loss goals. It will take a combination of both to see success. So, in addition to your food journal, you will also need to keep an exercise log.Write down the types of exercises that you do and how you feel during and after each exercise. You should be doing both aerobic exercises and weight training exercises. Aerobic exercises burns old fat and calories and decreases the amount of fat that lives over the abdominal area.

Types of aerobic exercises are walking, speedwalking, swimming and bicycling. You should work out at least four to five times during the week.

Strength training is also important because it will help you keep up with your aerobic exercises. Also, strength training will burn even more calories and fat if it is combined with aerobic exercises.

You will not meet your weight loss goal immediately. It will take some time. After all, you did not gain your weight overnight. Depending on how much you weigh, it will take at least three months of working towards your goal until you see results. The more overweight you are, the longer it will take you to reach your goal weight. Stay with it. Continue with your food and exercise logs so that you can see your improvements and also see where you need to make changes.

12

To Accomplish 20 Times as Much, Select the Best Measurements


 Donald Mitchell Business/Business 2008-05-04
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To accomplish 20 times as much, you need to learn and continually use all eight steps of the 2,000 percent solution process in this order.

The steps are listed here:

1. Understand the importance of measuring performance.

2. Decide what to measure.

3. Identify the future best practice and measure it.

4. Implement beyond the future best practice.

5. Identify the ideal best practice.

6. Pursue the ideal best practice.

7. Select the most effective people and provide the right motivation.

8. Repeat the first seven steps.

In this essay, you'll learn how to pursue the second step: Decide what to measure.

Having created an environment where the value of measurements is appreciated, your next step is to gain the most benefit from measurements. Begin by focusing on a particularly important process within your organization where you expect to find a large improvement opportunity. Then you should determine what measurements about this process will help you make the fastest progress. If you are a laggard in developing successful new products in an industry where that skill is critical, the new product development process would be a fine place to start. Using the experience that you gain in looking at the first process, you can go on to extend this approach to other important processes and opportunities.

Pick Your Organization's Low-Hanging Ripe Fruit

Organizations that make exponential progress are much more focused than competitors on making large improvements. The natural tendency is, by comparison, to measure processes where progress delivers emotional satisfaction to employees … whether or not improving those processes will be very beneficial to the organization's success. Fight that tendency where the potential benefits are modest.

Change Is a Moving Target

As circumstances change, what you need to measure changes too. For example, at one time U.S. auto quality was so poor that drivers primarily sought cars that wouldn't break down. Many U.S. consumers bought Japanese vehicles. But when American quality improved, customers started seeking brands that offered the best dealer service. That was a short-lived trend, however, as better new-car quality reduced the need for dealer service.

Styling again became important. Lexus lost ground because it did not look much different than much less expensive Japanese offerings. Next, American drivers went for minivans and sport utility vehicles. At first, Japanese companies did not respond because such vehicles were not in demand in Japan. As you can see from this example, you will fail if you keep measuring and focusing on the same thing. As each shortcoming is eliminated, customer cravings will shift to something else. The able executive will continually switch what is measured, how much emphasis is placed on that measure, and what actions are taken to reflect the current and potential customer and stakeholder environments.

Find the Suggestion-Box Winners

A large consumer products company found that it lagged all of its competitors in measures of financial performance. Stung by this information into wanting to change, management encouraged employees to suggest improvements. Tens of thousands of suggestions were received.

Rather than treat all these ideas equally, management established a review team that included executives from every functional area. The reviewers looked for ideas that offered enormous immediate and long-term benefits that were easy to implement right away.

Another team of fifteen executives was assigned to see that these top options got enough implementation attention. One percent of the ideas provided 95 percent of the cumulative improvement. As a result of this effort, three years later the organization was the number one performer in its industry by any financial measurement.

Choosing to pursue those highest potential ideas aggressively was a good idea. You should do the same.

Less Is More

A lack of focus may mean that no gains occur. A major retailing company learned this lesson in the late 1970s. Panicked by earnings drooping below breakeven, management looked to implement 100 improvement projects in a year. None succeeded. At that point, focus shifted to just four high payoff programs, none of which was on the original list of 100 projects. These programs all succeeded due to focused attention, and the company was soon earning high profits.

Pick Improvements That Help Everything Else

What do you do when nothing works well? Identify how performance in one area affects performance in all other areas. Another leading retailer with severe problems learned this lesson by testing a number of improvement ideas to see how many other performance areas were helped. What was learned? Allowing employees to spend more time serving customers made both employees and customers much happier. Sales and profits rose as a result. This approach was counter to the retailer's previous instinct to slash employees every time that profit targets were missed.

Measure at the Right Level with the Right Measure

Large organizations often confuse themselves by overaveraging what they measure. For example, tracking the average temperature on a given day around the world won't tell a retailer what kind of apparel to offer in a given store. Start looking at the temperature by store, and you may begin to improve your stocking.

STALLBUSTERS

Identify Your Most Important Processes

Ask these questions to begin your search for your most important processes:

1. How long could your organization survive without each process?

2. How long could your organization prosper if each process were done poorly?

3. How long will your organization last if it performs each process less well than competitors?

Having gotten a sense of what your most critical processes are, ask these questions:

1. If you did the process as well as you can imagine it, what would be the size of the benefit compared to how well you are doing today?

2. If you implented the process as well as you can imagine it, what other opportunities would open up?

3. What would pursuing those opportunities be worth?

Potentially Important Processes to Measure

1. Monitoring of institutional investor decisions to purchase your competitors' shares and debt rather than yours

2. Developing new products and services that provide customers with major benefits over competitors' offerings

3. Marketing for attracting and retaining customers with whom you have a profit margin advantage over competitors

4. Shifting your mix of customers, products, and services to improve your costs versus competitors

5. Identifying and implementing your most important cost-reduction opportunities

6. Finding and realizing your organization's largest opportunity areas

7. Reducing cost of capital in ways other than by borrowing more money and refinancing at lower interest costs

8. Adjusting compensation and recognition activities to reinforce helpful employee behavior

9. Obtaining win-win ideas for mutual benefit from suppliers, partners, and the communities you serve

Find the Critical Factors for Your Most Important Process

Once you have selected an important process to focus on, narrow your attention further to reveal the most important parts of the process. The following questions will help you:

1. Who can help you determine the critical factors in the process you are investigating?

2. How can you measure what may cause or influence the process's important aspects?

3. What's the best way to check your conclusions about the critical factors of important processes by using statistical analyses?

Start by Measuring Everything You Can Think of (That Seems Worth the Cost) Concerning the Process's Output and Its Influences - and Then Narrow Your Focus

This is a good time to identify which measures are most available for comparisons outside of your organization. Be sure to check all your data to see how well they help you understand your performance. Once you've done that, begin eliminating some measurements while paying more attention to others. To make this shift, work with data until you can identify causes and effects with statistical accuracy.

In deciding how much to spend to measure and analyze, keep in mind the size of the potential benefits. Some expensive measures are well worth the cost. One firm found that a single measure (which cost more than all of the other measures combined) provided almost all of the insights into improving an essential process. Had the company stopped looking because of expense, the firm's sales would be less than half and profits below a quarter of the current level.

Copyright 2007 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved


13

Use Measurements to Check Your Perceptions of Irresistible Forces and Powerful Trends


 Donald Mitchell Business/Management 2008-03-26
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First, you need an inventory of your irresistible forces and powerful trends. Then, you need to measure those forces and trends.

Because you probably haven't spent much time thinking about and studying many of the irresistible forces listed in your inventory before now, you'll probably find that your perceptions of the irresistible forces are often inaccurate or out-of-date. A critical step in your application of irresistible force management is to use measurements to refine your understanding of the irresistible forces affecting your enterprise. For example, until you have measurements, you will probably mistake the relative importance of the various irresistible forces you should be using to your advantage.

How can you measure or assess the nature, strength, direction, and impact of each irresistible force?

At this point, you will do well to find more measurements than you may actually need. It's important that you not miss important clues about these irresistible forces, and a low level of knowledge now could cause you to miss those clues if you stop measuring too soon.

These measurements should include as many dimensions as possible. For example, how does each irresistible force affect users, customers, distributors, partners, employees, suppliers, competitors, government, and communities? How is the influence different for your various products and services?

You'll need to use both external and internal measurements to get a complete perspective. For example, government data may give you a handle on what is happening to a certain group of customer (such as those defined by an SIC code) that is of interest to you. Industry data may be helpful for perspectives on competitors, customers, and users. Your own market research may be very valuable for adding business- and productive-specific perspectives concerning competitors, customers, and users as well. Be sure to gather data on users of competitors' products, also, as a point of comparison.

You may be surprised by how many valuable measurements are available. Most businesses capture very few measurements about their irresistible forces. Even the irresistible force measurements that are captured may be stashed inaccessibly in different parts of the organization so that they may have never been seen together. Make sure that effective communication of the measurements and their meanings is part of your measurement program.

How do the irresistible forces differ from your and your company's initial perceptions of these forces?

If you are like most people, you'll find that many of your perceptions about irresistible forces are off-target to some degree or another. In addition to analyzing how perceptions differ from the actuality, it's important to understand why those misperceptions have occurred.

Were your perceptions once accurate, but circumstances have since changed? Are your perceptions based on interaction with your largest customers, who are not typical of everyone who uses your products and services?

By answering these kinds of questions, you'll learn a lot about strengths and weaknesses you and your business have in developing information about your enterprise's environment.


14

Gigabytes and Bandwidth Are Not Measurements for the Best Web Host


 John V. W. Howe Internet Business/Site Promotion 2007-07-02
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When evaluating the best web host, don’t get bogged down in evaluating the gigabytes and bandwidth of the various hosts. That is not what really matters in your decision about which is the best web host. Do you know what really matters?

All over the Internet, you read ads for web hosting that tout the number of gigabytes of storage and the bandwidth that the particular web host will supply to you. Do you think this is the real measure of what make the best web host?

These are measurements of hardware capacity and can be provided by any web host, good or bad. Web hosts that advertise in this manner are a dime a dozen. Many of them come and go in the Internet business.

Some of these are resellers of web hosting that do not own their own hardware, but resell space on the server of another web host and you do not even know it. You sign on with them, they go out of business, and you are faced with a problem.

Any web host can provide gigabytes and bandwidth since these are necessary for a web site to function on the Internet. However, there are many other services that the best web host should provide. The best web site host should offer the following services: 1. Fast, reliable hosting 2. Reasonable cost for services provided 3. No initial set up fee 4. Domain registration included in hosting charge 5. Unlimited data transfer 6. Email customer support 7. Telephone customer support 8. Point and click page building 9. Unlimited web pages 10. Tools for brainstorming key words for your site theme 11. Tools for evaluating the supply and demand for your keywords 12. Assistance in building your web pages to make them search engine friendly 13. Uploading your own web pages if desired 14. Automatic submission of each new page or each updated page to the search engines 15. Page templates for your site 16. Customized 404 error pages 17. Automatic creation of Google and Yahoo site maps. 18. Inclusion of a blog site 19. Unlimited email accounts 20. Email forwarding 21. Email domain forwarding 22. Support forum of other users 23. Point and click custom input form creation tool 24. Unlimited autoresponders 25. Ability to upload XML code for RSS pages 26. Link exchange and link builder 27. eZine publishing tool 28. Email marketing list builder/distribution 29. Reports a. Search engine ranking report b. Traffic statistics and analysis c. Click tracking and analysis d. Keyword search report for search engines e. Tracking of search engine spiders 30. Any other additional services

You should not expect to receive this level of service for the cheap hosting prices that are advertised on the Net. The low prices are “lost leader” prices to hook you and get you signed up. After you have wasted a year trying to build a successful web site and failed, then you will start looking for the best web host to help you build a successful web site.

Don’t waste that year. Spend the time to find the best web host before you start building your web site.

The-Best-Web-Host.com can help you make the important decision about which web host is the best web host for your new web site.

Good luck on finding the best web host.

Copyright 2007 John Howe, Inc.

John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics. His website http://www.the-best-web-host.com helps people analyze their needs and match those needs to the best web host. He also publishes http://www.boomer-ezine.com an ezine for Internet entrepreneurs.


15

Review Measurements Three Times Before Measuring Twice and Cutting Once to Gain 20 Times More


 Donald Mitchell Business/Business 2007-09-17
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Carpenters have learned from painful mistakes to follow this rule: Measure twice; cut once.

However, that rule can be inadequate if the carpenter chooses the wrong thing to measure. For instance, measure from the wrong end of the board and you'll still make a mistake.

In this essay, you'll find out ways to pick the right measurements, ones that will speed you toward accomplishing 20 times as much with the same time, effort and resources (a 2,000 percent solution).

All the necessary steps are listed here for doing 20 times more:

1. Understand the importance of measuring performance.

2. Decide what to measure.

3. Identify the future best practice and measure it.

4. Implement beyond the future best practice.

5. Identify the ideal best practice.

6. Pursue the ideal best practice.

7. Select the right people and provide the right motivation.

8. Repeat the first seven steps.

After creating an environment where the value of measurements is appreciated, your next step is to gain the most benefit from measurements. Start by focusing on a particularly important process within your organization where you expect to find a large improvement opportunity. Then you should determine what measurements of this process will help you make the fastest progress. If you are a laggard in developing successful new products in an industry where that skill is critical, the new product development process would be a fine place to start. Using the experience that you gain in looking at the first process, you can go on to extend this approach to other important processes and opportunities.

Pick Your Organization's Low-Hanging Ripe Fruit

Organizations that make exponential improvements are much more focused than competitors on this kind of gain. The natural tendency is, by comparison, to measure processes where progress delivers emotional satisfaction to employees


16

Would You Hire a Carpenter Who Never Measures? -- Progress through Measurements of What to Work on


 Donald Mitchell Business/Business 2008-05-04
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If you think you measure enough in your business, you may be wrong. Why? Do you know how much time you spend on important tasks? Do you know whether you are doing that tasks in the best way? Here\'s more.

One CEO tells a Peter Drucker story about measurements that may fit you. Drucker had presented a seminar on personal improvement to the CEO\'s U.S. Air Force group years earlier.

Each man was instructed to measure in great detail how he spent his time for a week. The CEO found this task to be a life-changing experience.

The measurements revealed all of his bad habits and put the CEO on guard to avoid those bad habits in the future. Unfortunately, this CEO\'s example is rarely followed. Few want to know how they spend their time or what their output is.

Try this exercise for yourself: You don\'t have to be a CEO to benefit.

Measure how much time you spend each week on the telephone, doing each routine task, commuting, watching reruns on television, and so forth. Then look at how much you accomplished. You will see that measurements can help redirect your efforts into more productive activities.

A Perpetual Measuring Machine

Visitors to the finance and data processing staffs of a large company were astonished to note that each cubicle\'s walls were literally covered with performance measurements. The idea was to encourage more focus on expanding productivity. Almost all of the measurements had been developed by the workers for their own use. By looking at each others\' measurements, staff members could see how well they were doing in comparison. People pitched in to help lower performers improve so that everyone could earn department-wide, performance-based bonuses.

How did they do? Personal productivity gains of 25 percent were not unusual. Furthermore, corporate productivity in these same areas grew by a similar degree. By comparison, most organizations shoot for 2 to 3 percent annual productivity increases. Those low targets telegraph to everyone that they can take it easy.

End Results Versus Causes

Management of a luxury hotel chain learned that guests were dissatisfied because it took too long for room service breakfast orders to arrive.

The chain jumped in to solve the problem. It added more room service waiters. It even added more kitchen staff. But the situation got worse, not better.

Finally, they looked at how long it took for a waiter to make a delivery and return to the kitchen. Wait! Here was something.

The round trips took much too long. Management asked the room service waiters why. The bottleneck was quickly spotted. The waiters were delayed by as much as eight minutes by slow elevator arrivals at the kitchen and the guest room floors.

What was going on? Housekeepers were delivering a day\'s worth of clean sheets and towels at the same time. Since housekeepers had to unload large amounts of linen on each floor, they usually stopped the elevators while the unloading occurred.

Understanding the cause, linen deliveries were rescheduled to another time. Room-service complaints dropped to near zero.

With enough of the right measurements to find the causes of your performance, you\'ll soon be working on the right things, too.

Almost Perfect Is Often Not Good Enough

After many American manufacturers found that their quality badly lagged non-American competitors in the 1980s, quality improvement became an obsession. Soon, many companies were bragging that they performed at Six Sigma levels (hardly any errors per million activities).

Closer examination suggested that some of these companies had missed the boat. They had only achieved being nearly perfect in delivering outmoded offerings.

Motorola, for instance, the renowned Six Sigma innovator, saw its profits evaporate in the 1990s when the company fell behind Nokia and others in delivering new digital technologies to the market.

Some companies also didn\'t know how to measure their performance.

They broke down every process into hundreds of aspects. Each aspect was measured for performance. Sure enough, almost all aspects were done perfectly more than 99.9 percent of the time.

Everyone was smiling ... except the customers. As measured by what customers cared about, deliveries were deficient almost half the time. What was going on? It turns out that those little errors across hundreds of aspects compound and can cumulatively hit the customer hard. The firm should have been primarily measuring its ultimate performance for customers and then looking selectively into detail to locate where large strides could be made.

STALLBUSTERS

Use Measurements to Improve Your Personal Effectiveness

Ask yourself the following questions to better allocate your time and efforts:

1. How could I avoid having to do the least productive tasks at all and get better results?

2. How else could I have gotten these tasks done to get better results in less time?

3. How could I delegate these tasks to others for better results?

4. How could I inexpensively automate these tasks and meet my purposes?

5. When was I effective?

6. Why was I effective then?

7. When was I ineffective?

8. Why was I ineffective then?

9. How much time am I spending on time wasters?

10. How could I better spend the time I use on time wasters?

11. What will be the benefits to me and others of spending my time in these more productive areas?

Use Measurements to Improve the Effectiveness of Others

After you have acted on the answers to your personal improvement questions, you will be prepared to be credible as a helpful coach to others, especially with the answers to the following questions:

1. How can you interest other people in measurements?

2. How can you help others set up and use helpful measurements?

3. How can the message about the value of properly using measurements be spread even further?

Answer these questions and act on what you learn, and you\'ll be soon making lots of breakthroughs.


17

Select Measurements Three Times Before Measuring Twice and Cutting Once to Gain 20 Times More


 Donald Mitchell Business/Business 2008-05-04
View Detail
Woodworkers have learned from embarrassing mistakes to follow this rule: Measure twice; cut once.

However, that rule can be inadequate if the carpenter chooses the wrong thing to measure. For instance, measure from the wrong end of the board and you'll still make a mistake.

In this essay, you'll find out ways to pick the right measurements, ones that will speed you toward accomplishing 20 times as much with the same time, effort and resources (a 2,000 percent solution).

All the necessary steps are listed here for doing 20 times more:

1. Understand the importance of measuring performance.

2. Decide what to measure.

3. Identify the future best practice and measure it.

4. Implement beyond the future best practice.

5. Identify the ideal best practice.

6. Pursue the ideal best practice.

7. Select the right people and provide the right motivation.

8. Repeat the first seven steps.

After creating an environment where the value of measurements is appreciated, your next step is to gain the most benefit from measurements. Begin by focusing on a particularly important process within your organization where you expect to find a large improvement opportunity. Then you should determine what measurements of this process will help you make the fastest progress. If you are a laggard in developing successful new products in an industry where that skill is critical, the new product development process would be a fine place to start. Using the experience that you gain in looking at the first process, you can go on to extend this approach to other important processes and opportunities.

Pick Your Organization's Low-Hanging Ripe Fruit

Organizations that make exponential improvements are much more focused than competitors on this kind of gain. The natural tendency is, by comparison, to measure processes where progress delivers emotional satisfaction to employees … whether or not improving those processes will be very beneficial to the organization's success. Resist that tendency where the potential benefits are modest.

Change Is a Moving Target

As circumstances change, what you need to measure changes too. For example, at one time U.S. auto quality was so poor that drivers primarily sought cars that wouldn't break down. Many U.S. consumers bought Japanese vehicles. But when American automobile quality improved, customers started seeking brands that offered the best dealer service. That was a short-lived trend, however, as better new-car quality reduced the need for dealer service.

Styling again became important. Lexus lost ground because it did not look much different than much less expensive Japanese offerings. Next, American drivers went for minivans and sport utility vehicles. At first, Japanese companies did not respond because such vehicles were not in demand in Japan.

As you can see from this example, you will fail if you keep measuring and focusing on the same thing. As each shortcoming is eliminated, customer cravings will shift to something else. The able executive will continually switch what is measured, how much emphasis is placed on that measure, and what actions are taken to reflect the current and potential customer and stakeholder environments.

Find the Suggestion-Box Winners

A large consumer products company found that it lagged all of its competitors in measures of financial performance. Stung by this information into wanting to change, management encouraged employees to suggest improvements. Tens of thousands of suggestions were received.

Rather than treat all these ideas equally, management established a review team that included executives from every functional area. The reviewers looked for ideas that offered enormous immediate and long-term benefits that were easy to implement right away.

Another team of fifteen executives was assigned to see that these top options got enough implementation attention. One percent of the ideas provided 95 percent of the cumulative improvement. As a result of this effort, three years later the organization was the number one performer in its industry by any financial measurement.

Choosing to aggressively pursue those highest potential ideas was a good idea. You should do the same.

Less Is Usually More

A lack of focus may mean that no gains occur. A major retailing company learned this lesson in the late 1970s. Panicked by sales drooping below breakeven, management looked to implement 100 improvement projects in a year. None succeeded. At that point, focus shifted to just four high payoff programs, none of which was on the original list of 100 projects. These programs all succeeded due to focused attention, and the company was soon earning high profits.

Pick Improvements That Help Everything Else

What do you do when nothing works well? Identify how performance in one area affects performance in all other areas. Another leading retailer with severe problems learned this lesson by testing a number of improvement ideas to see how many other performance areas were helped. What was learned? Allowing employees to spend more time serving customers made both employees and customers much happier. Sales and earnings rose as a result. This approach was counter to the retailer's previous instinct to slash employees every time that profit targets were missed.

Measure at the Right Level with the Right Measure

Large organizations often confuse themselves by overaveraging what they measure. For example, tracking the average temperature on a given day around the world won't tell a retailer what kind of apparel to offer in a given store. Start looking at the temperature trends by store, and you may begin to improve your stocking.

STALLBUSTERS

Identify Your Most Important Processes

Ask these questions to begin your search for your most important processes:

• How long could your organization survive without each process?

• How long could your organization prosper if each process were done poorly?

• How long will your organization last if it performs each process less well than competitors?

Having developed a sense of what your most critical processes are, ask these questions:

• If you did the process as well as you can imagine it, what would be the size of the benefit compared to how well you are doing today?

• If you did the process as well as you can imagine it, what other opportunities would open up?

• What would developing those opportunities be worth?

Potentially Important Processes to Measure

• Developing new products and services that provide customers with major benefits over competitors' offerings

• Marketing for attracting and retaining customers with whom you have a profit margin advantage over competitors

• Shifting your mix of customers, products, and services to improve your costs versus competitors

• Identifying and implementing your most important cost-reduction opportunities

• Finding and realizing your organization's largest opportunity areas

• Reducing cost of capital in ways other than by borrowing more money and refinancing at lower interest costs

• Adjusting compensation and recognition activities to reinforce helpful employee behavior

• Obtaining win-win ideas for mutual benefit from suppliers, partners, and the communities you serve

• For public companies, monitoring of institutional investor decisions to purchase your competitors' shares and debt rather than yours

Find the Critical Factors for Your Most Important Process

Once you have selected an important process to focus on, narrow your attention further to reveal the most important parts of the process. The following questions will help you:

• Who can help you determine the critical factors in the process you are investigating?

• What's the best way to measure what may cause or influence the process's important aspects?

• What is the best way to check your conclusions about the critical factors concerning important processes by using statistical analyses?

Start by Measuring Everything You Can Think of (That Seems Worth the Cost) Concerning the Process's Output and Its Influences - and Then Narrow Your Focus

This is a good time to identify which measures are most available for comparisons outside of your organization. Be sure to check all your data to see how well they help you understand your performance. Once you've done that, begin eliminating some measurements while paying more attention to others. To make this shift, work with data until you can statistically identify causes and effects.

In deciding how much to spend to measure and analyze, keep in mind the size of the potential benefits. Some expensive measures are well worth the cost. One firm found that a single measure (which cost more than all of the other measures combined) provided almost all of the insights into improving an essential process. Had the company stopped looking because of expense, the firm's sales would be less than half and profits below a quarter of the current level.

Copyright 2007 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved


18

Choose Measurements Three Times Before Measuring Twice and Cutting Once to Achieve 20 Times More


 Donald Mitchell Business/Business 2007-09-17
View Detail
Woodworkers have learned from embarrassing mistakes to follow this rule: Measure twice; cut once.

However, that rule can be inadequate if the carpenter chooses the wrong thing to measure. For instance, measure from the wrong end of the board and you'll still make a mistake.

In this essay, you'll find out ways to pick the right measurements, ones that will speed you toward accomplishing 20 times as much with the same time, effort and resources (a 2,000 percent solution).

All the necessary steps are listed here for doing 20 times more:

1. Understand the importance of measuring performance.

2. Decide what to measure.

3. Identify the future best practice and measure it.

4. Implement beyond the future best practice.

5. Identify the ideal best practice.

6. Pursue the ideal best practice.

7. Select the right people and provide the right motivation.

8. Repeat the first seven steps.

After creating an environment where the value of measurements is appreciated, your next step is to gain the most benefit from measurements. Start by focusing on a particularly important process within your organization where you expect to find a large improvement opportunity. Then you should determine what measurements about this process will help you make the fastest progress. If you are a laggard in developing successful new products in an industry where that skill is critical, the new product development process would be a fine place to start. Using the experience that you gain in looking at the first process, you can go on to extend this approach to other important processes and opportunities.

Pick Your Organization's Low-Hanging Ripe Fruit

Organizations that make exponential improvements are much more focused than competitors on this kind of gain. The natural tendency is, by comparison, to measure processes where progress delivers emotional satisfaction to employees ... whether or not improving those processes will be very beneficial to the organization's success. Fight that tendency where the potential benefits are modest.

Change Is a Moving Target

As circumstances change, what you need to measure changes too. For example, at one time U.S. auto quality was so poor that drivers primarily sought cars that wouldn't break down. Many U.S. consumers bought Japanese vehicles. But when American quality improved, customers started seeking brands that offered the best dealer service. That was a short-lived trend, however, as better new-car quality reduced the need for dealer service.

Styling again became important. Lexus lost ground because it did not look much different than much less expensive Japanese offerings. Next, American drivers went for minivans and sport utility vehicles. At first, Japanese companies did not respond because such vehicles were not in demand in Japan.

As you can see from this example, you will fail if you keep measuring and focusing on the same thing. As each shortcoming is eliminated, customer cravings will shift to something else. The able executive will continually switch what is measured, how much emphasis is placed on that measure, and what actions are taken to reflect the current and potential customer and stakeholder environments.

Find the Suggestion-Box Winners

A large consumer products company found that it lagged all of its competitors in measures of financial performance. Stung by this information into wanting to change, management encouraged employees to suggest improvements. Tens of thousands of suggestions were received.

Rather than treat all these ideas equally, management established a review team that included executives from every functional area. The reviewers looked for ideas that offered enormous immediate and long-term benefits that were easy to implement right away.

Another team of fifteen executives was assigned to see that these top options got enough implementation attention. One percent of the suggestions provided 95 percent of the cumulative improvement. As a result of this effort, three years later the organization was the number one performer in its industry by any financial measurement.

Choosing to pursue those highest potential ideas aggressively was a good idea. You should do the same.

Less Is Usually More

A lack of focus may mean that no gains occur. A major retailing company learned this lesson in the late 1970s. Panicked by sales drooping below breakeven, management looked to implement more than 100 improvement projects in a year. None succeeded. At that point, focus shifted to just four high payoff programs, none of which was on the original list of 100 projects. These programs all succeeded due to focused attention, and the company was soon earning high profits.

Pick Improvements That Help Everything Else

What do you do when nothing works well? Identify how performance in one area affects performance in all other areas. Another leading retailer with severe problems learned this lesson by testing a number of improvement ideas to see how many other performance areas were helped. What was learned? Allowing employees to spend more time serving customers made both employees and customers much happier. Sales and profits rose as a result. This approach was counter to the retailer's previous instinct to slash employees every time that profit targets were missed.

Measure at the Right Level with the Right Measure

Large organizations often confuse themselves by overaveraging what they measure. For example, tracking the average temperature on a given day around the world won't tell a retailer what kind of apparel to offer in a given store. Start looking at the temperature trends by store, and you may begin to improve your stocking.

STALLBUSTERS

Identify Your Most Important Processes

Ask these questions to begin your search for your most important processes:

• How long could your organization survive without each process?

• How long could your organization prosper if each process were done poorly?

• How long will your organization last if it performs each process less well than competitors?

Having developed a sense of what your most critical processes are, ask these questions:

• If you did the process as well as you can imagine it, what would be the size of the benefit compared to how well you are doing today?

• If you did the process as well as you can imagine it, what other opportunities would open up?

• What would developing those opportunities be worth?

Potentially Important Processes to Measure

• Developing new products and services that provide customers with major benefits over competitors' offerings

• Marketing for attracting and retaining customers with whom you have a profit margin advantage over competitors

• Shifting your mix of customers, products, and services to improve your costs versus competitors

• Identifying and implementing your most important cost-reduction opportunities

• Finding and realizing your organization's largest opportunity areas

• Reducing cost of capital in ways other than by borrowing more money and refinancing at lower interest costs

• Adjusting compensation and recognition activities to reinforce helpful employee behavior

• Obtaining win-win ideas for mutual benefit from suppliers, partners, and the communities you serve

• For public companies, monitoring of institutional investor decisions to purchase your competitors' shares and debt rather than yours

Find the Critical Factors for Your Most Important Process

Once you have selected an important process to focus on, narrow your attention further to reveal the most important parts of the process. The following questions will help you:

• Who can help you determine the critical factors in the process you are investigating?

• How can you measure what may cause or influence the process's important aspects?

• What's the best way to check your conclusions about the critical factors of important processes by using statistical analyses?

Start by Measuring Everything You Can Think of (That Seems Worth the Cost) Concerning the Process's Output and Its Influences - and Then Narrow Your Focus

This is a good time to identify which measures are most available for comparisons outside of your organization. Be sure to check all your data to see how well they help you understand your performance. Once you've done that, begin eliminating some measurements while paying more attention to others. To make this shift, work with data until you can statistically identify causes and effects.

In deciding how much to spend to measure and analyze, concentrate on the size of the potential benefits. Some expensive measures are well worth the cost. One firm found that a single measure (which cost more than all of the other measures combined) provided almost all of the insights into improving an essential process. Had the company stopped looking because of expense, the firm's sales would be less than half and profits below a quarter of the current level.

Copyright 2007 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved

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