Do You Keep Score In Your Company

Do you keep score in your company? Do you know the score on a daily basis or do you have to wait until the end of the month for the books to close on the previous month? What does it cost you to have to wait to know what the score is?

And what about your people? Do they know what the score is? Do they know which number is most critical and where that number stands today? Or are they standing in center field with no scoreboard (often called a dashboard in business) to look at, and no effective way to ask for that information?

If you were to put up a scoreboard in your office, store or factory, what's the one key number that would have to be on it? This may change over time, but for this quarter or this year, what is your critical number? Is it inventory turns per year, or profit per transaction, or transactions per hour or what?

Back to our baseball field, they don't just track the score, do they? They also display historical data (how many runs were scored each inning of the game we're playing now), the number of hits and errors for each team, and current status (balls and strikes for the current batter, the number of outs, and which bases are occupied). Some scoreboards also give you the name of the pitcher and batter, and perhaps who's next up to bat. The center field scoreboard also displays many other bits of information, like the status of other games being played the same day.

What's analogous in your business? Besides that one critical number, what else might be useful for people to have within their line of sight?

There's one other type of dashboard that successful companies are using, as a management tool. This dashboard (scoreboard) shows a row for each of the company quarterly priorities (rocks) with the name of the priority and the name of the accountable person. Each column has a date, and each quarter with therefore have 13 columns for the 13 weeks.

Each week, the person accountable for that priority (rock holder) designates a color for that priority. If the priority is numerical and we're on track, that's green. If we missed but are close, that's yellow. If we're red, that means we're in the unacceptable range. 

For a milestone based priority, if we've met the milestones for that week, that's green. If we've fallen a bit behind but think we can catch up without a major change or reallocation of resources, that's yellow. If something major needs to change in order to get back on track, that's red. 

If the priority isn't so easy to define, we should talk more about how to set good quarterly priorities, but in any case, the rock holder can simply give a color based on their own prediction about where that priority will end up at the end of the quarter. There's no incentive for someone to give an overly rosy picture, because if they're showed green for 12 weeks and then turned up red.

Most Important Assets To A Company

The business compete with other firms you have to find a way to beat them in terms of cost and productivity. The easiest way to sustain your own business while beating others is to take a look at all the assets and money you are spending and see how you can lower them while increasing their performance.

Workers

These are the most expensive investments that you will make. When you are going to hire employees you want to find a way to make sure that they are productive and working how you want to them to be. Always keep tabs on what they are doing and you can include in the contract to have regular checkups to make sure they are being productive and not slacking around.

In the situation that you have many employees then you would have to have a system to manage their performance. You can give your employees bonus money if they perform well. Another thing that occurs a lot is a specific mark that they have to meet each week or month. This usually happens in markets where they are trying to sell a product or service. Therefore this might not be the best method to implement for everyone.

If you have a large computer system you can also add in monitoring systems on the computer and see what your workers are doing at all times. Different software are also good at increasing performance by integrating systems and machines together to help them

Investments in Technology

These kinds of investments tend to have a high first time investment and then smaller investments for upgrades and such things later on. If you are in an office the investments will be with computers, software, printers, faxing machines and others. Once you get these you can usually use them for long periods of time. Support and maintenance usually will cost a small fraction of the original purchasing price.

Furniture Investment

Every company needs chairs, tables, closets and even cubicles. The majority of people need these to have a proper working environment. Furnishing your company is an expensive task, however once you do so, the furniture can last many years without having to replace them.

Out of the three that we have discussed in this article, workers take up the most value in terms of expenditures in assets.