One of the fundamental principles that we operate on with siteMighty is having data at our fingertips so that we know what is going on at all times. We do this by 1) setting metrics, 2) gathering data, and 3) presenting it in an actionable way.
I have…

I just came across your blog in that typical “ok, now how did I get here again?” fashion. Some interesting stuff.

I am not clear on what kind of information you’re looking to get. Information on your employees – ie. productivity – or information on your customers?

Market information is very important – knowing what your customers are thinking etc. But you know that. Knowing what your employees are doing/ thinking is another thing altogether. We set up some very nice, very elaborate spreadsheets that told us great things, like daily productivity right down to the billable/ cash billable/ non-billable/ gross margin minute. Ultimately, all the graphs and spreadsheets couldn’t solve my internal challenges, and simply worked counter productively – encouraging staff to exaggerate time and stress out about micro management amoung other things.

Ultimately, you risk adding overhead for little or no benefit.

Instead I’ve found that a) making sure the right people are in the right place and b) making sure the systems support and nurture those people is the best way to go.

We use basecamp – and love it – seconding the basecamp mentioned above. Great communication and project management tool.

Good luck

So in other words, make sure you’re recording and measuring the correct data first.

Like Alex, I would also be careful how much data you ask people to record each week. My experience is getting people to fill in a simple time sheet is difficult enough, let alone an array of complex business performance metrics.

Ryan, will you be sharing your Master Spreadsheet? Well the template of course.

Hey Brad,

I don’t think so. Only because it’s very specific to our business, and wouldn’t be useful in general.

Sorry about that.

- Ryan

Ryan, will you be sharing your Master Spreadsheet? Well the template of course.

http://www.softwaregarden.com/wkcalpha/

It seems like it would fit your needs in that it would allow multiple people to edit it, would keep a history, and would probably be a lot easier to maintain than some Excel versioning hack-job.

That said, I’m not sure if it supports every type of formula you would need. But it does seem to be quite full-featured.

I got to speak with you for a few minutes at the UK meetup at SXSW and have been a fan of your various websites for some time. Keep up the good work!

We also run numbers directly out of the DB. At some point, I would like to combine the effort and have them automatically update — but as you know, when running fast, go for the 90% solution first and work your way to 100%!

Knew, not new. Other than that, great article.

Thanks Tim :)

In your article a few weeks ago ‘Kickstart’, you mentioned autoresponders. I’ve done a little research on this so far. Are you using already or planning on using IntelliContact?

We’re not using IntelliContact right now, but I hear it’s a great app.

Your staff can be users in realtime and therefore it would be a collaborative spreadsheet…

There’s a lot of contributors, I think — being profitable reduces urgency, constant business opportunities coming in demand attention, and (as you mentioned) spending too much time on the day-to-day operations details gets in the way. But also, I think having a diverse business makes things especially difficult for small companies. Each area of doing business has its own operations details, cash flow dynamics, etc. making it difficult to even uniformly identify and capture the right data, much less analysis it in a global way.

Obviously, I don’t have an answer to propose. I can tell you what we’re doing to try to improve the situation though. We’ve developed a time reporting web app that fits all our business activities. Mainly it allows us to create bookable “assignments” to staff which associate:

1. Customer
2. Budget Line
3. Project
4. Task

With these four independent elements, we can at least model everything from web app development (where the customer could even be external, or us), to consultancy, to internal training.

We also try to capture as much as possible in QuickBooks (which I think is a great app!) Since we run companies in Europe in addition to the US, we have to fiddle things a bit, since QB (at least the Mac version) seems very specific to the US market.

Finally, for the Mac, the management staff enter a lot of data in Daylite (which I think is another great app.)

Though there will be some things that need to be measured off-line or that require specific input from your team, you can always create a simple input interface so you can get that too in the DB and utilize the metrics.

As you say the measurements are different, so the important part is finding out first WHAT to measure and WHAT is important.