MetricMondays are the best way to manage the health of your business with agility. Using a set weekly agenda based on your mission-critical metrics, proactively manage your team’s workflow to keep your organization focused on what matters most in creating stability and delivering measurable results.
Video Transcription
Hi, everyone. Thanks for tuning in to the Virtual Strategist. My name is Erica Olsen. I’m the CEO and co-founder of OnStrategy. Today’s whiteboard session is on MetricMondays, which is our trademark word for weekly health check-ins. This video is part of our agile strategy series or agile strategic planning. We have a four-part framework to bring agile strategic planning into your organization: agile roadmaps, strategy sprints, business health metrics, and MetricMondays or weekly health check-ins. Check out our other whiteboard videos on those three other topics. Today we’re talking about weekly health check-ins or MetricMondays.
What is a MetricMonday?
So what is a MetricMonday? It is a retrospective review of your organization’s performance for the previous week. It is the heartbeat of making an agile process, or an agile strategic planning process and results management process work for your organization. It is your staff meeting and it is specifically bringing the business health metrics of your performance for your organization into your weekly priority setting. You’re taking the long-term and bringing it into the short-term. So let’s talk about it.
Checklist
Here’s your checklist for how to actually make it work for you and get it going in your organization. So first things first, you connect the long-term with the short-term by having a handful of performance measures, health metrics, per strategic priorities, or read strategic priority here. You don’t want too many, but you also want to be comprehensive, so you’re looking at, holistically, at your whole organization’s performance.
Each metric has a dedicated owner that not only reports on the data, but also is responsible for driving the results, and that’s a big tip. We learned a hard lesson that just reporting on the data doesn’t work; you have got to report on it and that same person needs to be responsible for moving the needle, so to speak. No one person in your MetricMonday meeting has more than five metrics, otherwise it’s just too much and it’s too hard for that individual to get ready on a weekly basis. There’s a tip too. If it takes each person more than 15 minutes per week to get ready for the meeting, then they have too much to report on. No more than five metrics is a good rule of thumb.
Each metric has an identified data source, even if it’s manual, it doesn’t matter, you know where it’s coming from. It’s easy to get. And then of course you have a clear reporting timeframe and everybody uses the same timeframe, otherwise it’s too confusing. So let’s talk about what we mean. We mean a timeframe such as Sunday through Friday, that’s the reporting of the results such that you’re rolling into Monday, right? You’ve got a couple of days to get ready for it. So rolling into Monday, you’re looking back at the previous week, Sunday through Friday.
Running your MetricsMondays
So one thing that’s worth noting here is it’s much easier to use an application to run your MetricMondays. OnStrategy has an app, we built it purposely for running weekly health check-in, so it does all these things for you. Check it out, we’d love to give you a peek under the hood.
Let’s look at how your weekly meeting would go. Here’s your agenda. It’s your staff meeting, so start with your opening remarks. And then you go priority by priority whereby you report on the performance of each metric or metrics, right? And then you move on to the next priority. Each section should probably take no more than 10 minutes, and each metric maybe 2 minutes or less. So it’s purposely fast, rapid moving, that’s how we keep it to 60 minutes or less. What’s also worth noting is we are not reporting by team, we’re purposely reporting by strategic priority because this is a view of your organization’s performance and where you’re moving your business, not just team performance. Super important.
What keeps you to 60 minutes or less is making sure that each metric owner has two talking points. Talking point number one is how do we perform against goal last week? This piece here is critical. So we want to hear, the goal was this, we performed this way, for the week and then also year-to-date. And then the so what? So that’s great, we know our performance, but what are we doing about it? Is there any different action we’re taking this week than what we thought we were going to? Are we proposing a change or a shift or is the action on deck still moving forward? So what action are we taking this week? If every metric owner has these two talking points, they keep their talking to less than 2 minutes, you’ll get through your review in 60 minutes or less and you’ll have a really effective MetricMonday.
That’s it. Thanks for tuning in. If you haven’t subscribed to our channel, please do so. Happy strategizing.
