Is it sufficient to publish a mission statement starting "to be perceived as the best in the IT industry at ...."? I once took exception to this approach, believing that delivery against documented Service Level Targets using industry-recognised Project Management reporting tools was sufficient to prove that I was meeting my customer's needs. I also considered that the end users if the IT solutions that I was responsible for providing were the only persons that really mattered. I viewed my staff (and indeed my colleagues on the board) as only a vehicle to deliver against my measureable objectives; the former to provide working systems, and the latter to agree to my business case for capital investment to provide those working systems.
In IT we love to measure 'things' to prove to the world that we are delivering. It's in the nature of our profession. We rarely consider the import of Moore's Law, which states, depending on which idiom you agree on, that "... any measure, when used as a target, ceases to become a good measure". So, even if we are measuring those things that we believe are adding value to our customers, are these measures a true reflection of actual fit-for-purpose delivery?
Only a picture of 'hard' delivery metrics from project reporting tools, tempered with a picture of 'soft' metrics of our current customers perception, reported against similar if not identical Key Performance Indicators, can provide us with a balanced picture against which to truly understand a genuine 'status quo'. I believe that most Balanced Scorecards do not embrace enough of the 'soft' metrics. Why is this? Is it that our finite occupation does'nt understand them, or simply that we don't trust them?
I was once happily reporting excellent delivery against my targets to the board, to be told by more than one of my fellow directors "that's not what I'm hearing ....". I was blind to what they were hearing ..... I was too busy 'meeting my targets'. Only armed with an up-to-date Customer Satisfaction Survey did I realise that I was indeed meeting my targets, but those targets were not relevant and business-oriented, and therefore not providing what my customers really needed to support their business needs.
Fixing what we perceive as technical problems on an IT production platform may not fix those perceived business support problems being experienced by our customer.
Not too long ago, a study reported that over 50% of IT staff believed that they add value to the business. However, over 50% of those business users did not believe that IT added value to their business.
I respectfully submit that there is a Perception Gap here which needs to be addressed if IT is to be considered a true business partner in the reality of today.
You are right perception is everything. Sadly though it can't be the only measurement of success because it is too subjective.
I too have been in a board meeting presenting the service statistics which show a nice sea of green only to be told that it wasn't the perception and our SLAs were no longer valid for the company. Our SLAs were seen as too easy for us to meet. We then spent six months of work looking at each target and realigning them with the customer’s requirements and came out with a different set of SLA targets which we agreed. Within three months I was hitting the same problem.
The issue is that incentives matter and our incentives were to meet the SLAs. The early ones were based on concerns at the time and because we had incentives to meet them (by getting to keep our jobs) they then became of less concern to the customer. When he dropped them as SLAs we then started to concentrate on the new ones, surprise surprise, and the standards reduced. All still within the agreed SLAs.
Perception is everything but it can’t be everything because you cannot qualify it. It can’t be measured by SMART objectives and it can’t ever be more than a soft metric. Although you should always try and improve your perception as much as you can. At least find out what they are and try and resolve them.
In addition whilst chasing down bad perceptions I’ve had feedback that our service was poor. On investigation it was found to be something that had happened over a year before. One issue on one day over a year ago and it was still skewing the perception metrics.
I wouldn't want my salary to be reliant on someone else perceptions of your entire team and not cold hard metrics?