R&D METRICS / BALANCED SCORECARD

SOFTWARE AND PROCESSES TO CONSOLIDATE
EXECUTION METRICS WITH BALANCED SCORECARD

What is your challenge as you see it?

“As the Director of R&D, my challenge is to limit the information flow to just the essential, practical set of metrics – that are absolutely critical to improving our productivity and enhancing our quality of development. But we run into difficulties in collecting that vital information. We do not have a process – leave alone an automated process – for the discipline and rigor of collecting metrics from our development centers. People have to take time away to provide raw data for metrics. After that, we have issues of metrics data integrity and reliability. We then have consolidation issues of metrics, and issues with understanding Key Performance Measures, before we even dream of creating an R&D Balanced Scorecard.”

What solutions do you have today?

”Today, we have a process in place, primarily manual in terms of collecting the output from individual projects. We have engaged the R&D project managers to give us metrics about their projects on a monthly basis, even though it takes time away from their work. We then aggregate the metrics and manually produce two sets of scorecards – one that gives the details of our execution, and the other that interprets the same results in light of our R&D organizational objectives. And in the end, the overall value of the reports is very subjective.”

What exactly do you need and why is it different?

You need an automated mechanism for collecting execution metrics. That puts time back in the hands of R&D Managers to focus on product development. You need uniformity in the metrics that is being collected across projects, and each project has to give metrics regarding all facets of development, their spend, execution, resources, issues and hurdles. On top of that, you need to connect the dots, in terms of linking the performance of every project against the overall organizational value that it adds, to be measured against the Target Metrics expectations of the overall R&D organizations, to be painted in the Balanced Scorecard. And when any business performance is questioned, you need an automated mechanism that would provide details and justifications needed, right within the system, without leaving any doubts or, without having to call the individual R&D project manager or team for a meeting to explain the variance.

What does GRIP R&D Metrics and Balanced Scorecard do? (What are its features?)

R&D Metrics and Balanced Scorecard is a combination of two metrics engines into one. The first engine is a bottom-up, enterprise-wide development metrics data collection system, which will provide direct, execution level metrics entry, as well as extract data from feeder systems that provide raw data with respect to spend, schedules and milestones, and resource utilization and expectations. The second engine is the top-down Balanced Scorecard, which collects the Target metrics at the highest level from all perspectives. This twin-engine setup within R&D Metrics and Balanced Scorecard work together effectively underneath. From a top-down approach, executives can rationalize their investment to the details, and from the bottom-up, when a tactical aspect misses the mark, executives can assess the impact of it at the organizational level.

Part of the Bigger Picture…

R&D Metrics and Balanced Scorecard is part of the overarching GRIP management framework.