15.1 Measurement Types and the Change Delivery Scorecard
Key Takeaways
- Change managers must define and agree measures and indicators reflective of the desired outcomes, known as key performance indicators
- The three factors to consider when defining measures are cadence, actionable and need
- Cadence is when and how often data is collected, and actionable asks what will happen as a result and who is accountable
- Kaplan and Norton offer four metric types for a scorecard: financial, customer, internal, and learning and growth
- Learning and growth covers human capital, information capital and organisational capital
To show the change is on track, change managers must define and agree a set of measures and indicators reflective of the desired outcomes — key performance indicators (KPIs). CM3 adds an important qualifier: the selection of metrics should have input from users and needs strong buy-in from stakeholders.
That qualifier matters. Metrics imposed on people are gamed; metrics people helped choose are used. It is co-design applied to measurement, and it also protects fairness in SCARF terms, since being measured against criteria you had no say in is a classic fairness threat.
Three factors to consider
| Factor | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Cadence (rhythm) | When and how often data is collected |
| Actionable | What will happen as a result? Who is accountable for this? |
| Need | Co-design and align expectations around why measures are in place and how they indicate progress |
Actionable is the factor that kills most change measurement. A metric collected with no defined response and no accountable owner produces a chart nobody acts on and, in time, a chart nobody reads. Before adopting any change measure, the two questions to answer are: what will we do differently at each plausible value, and who owns that decision? If neither has an answer, the measure should not be collected.
Cadence is a real design choice rather than an afterthought. Measure too frequently and you see noise and impose survey fatigue; too infrequently and you learn about a problem after the window to fix it has closed. Cadence should match how fast the thing being measured can actually move.
The change delivery scorecard
Kaplan and Norton (2004) offer four types of metric and corresponding questions that are useful when building a scorecard covering different views on value:
| Category | The question | Example metrics |
|---|---|---|
| Financial | If we succeed, how will we look to our stakeholders (or taxpayers or donors)? | Cost reductions, revenue increase, resource use |
| Customer | To achieve our vision, how must we look to our customer (internal or external)? | Quality, customer service, partnership behaviours |
| Internal | To satisfy our customers, which process must we excel at? | Operational, customer management, innovation or regulatory process metrics — time to market, reductions in risk profiles, number of information data breaches |
| Learning & growth | To achieve our vision, how must our organisation learn and improve? | Human capital (employee knowledge, skills and ability profiles); information capital (knowledge management and sharing systems); organisational capital (culture aspects such as teamwork, alignment and leadership styles) |
Note that customer explicitly includes internal customers. A change to an internal shared service has customers, and measuring how it looks to them is a legitimate scorecard category.
Learning and growth is the change-relevant category
The three capitals under learning and growth are the ones most directly connected to change management:
- Human capital — employee knowledge, skills and ability profiles. This is where the learning dip, competence development and ADKAR's knowledge and ability steps become measurable
- Information capital — knowledge management and sharing systems
- Organisational capital — culture aspects such as teamwork, alignment and leadership styles. This is where change maturity, psychological safety and Taylor's culture mechanisms show up in numbers
A scorecard that reports only financial and customer metrics will show a change succeeding right up to the point where the depleted human and organisational capital produces a failure nobody predicted.
Building a usable scorecard
A change delivery scorecard sets, for each category, an indicator with a current value and a target value — for example reducing operating costs from a current overspend to a target saving, cutting billing time from seven days to three, reducing monthly complaints from 125 to 20, raising a right-first-time rate from 40% to 85%, moving a centralisation measure from 15% to 100%, or lifting training uptake from 0% to 85%.
Three design points make such a scorecard work in practice:
- Balance across the four categories. The point of a scorecard is that no single view of value dominates. Change programmes gravitate to internal process metrics because they are easiest to collect.
- A current value as well as a target. Without a baseline, a target is an aspiration and progress cannot be shown.
- Few enough measures to act on. A scorecard with forty indicators fails the actionable test by construction, because no one can respond to forty signals.
Connecting measurement back to the change
Measurement is not a reporting obligation bolted onto the end. It is the discovery input to the continuous change management cycle, it is what makes ADKAR's reinforcement step answerable — is it working, and how is that demonstrated? — and it is one of the five behaviours of an effective change manager: continuously watch for insights from change analytics and process feedback.
Which of the following is one of the three factors CM3 says to consider when defining change measures?
In the Kaplan and Norton change delivery scorecard, which category covers human capital, information capital and organisational capital?
Why does CM3 say the selection of change metrics should have input from users and strong stakeholder buy-in?