As part of SOS^TM,it is essential to keep a team scorecard and metrics of your business activities. Why? Because you are trying to measure whether or not you are achieving your quantitative goals gathered from data analytics.

The availability of data analytics today is much greater than it ever has been in the past. The digital age has opened up many more avenues to track information. You can see below how much data is being tracked by the minute every single day on some of the leading websites and apps available on the market. 

Source: DOMO. Data Never Sleeps 8.0

Let’s examine a few highlights from the Infographic (above). 

How much data is generated every minute of every day:

• Consumers spend $1M online
• WhatsApp users share 41.6M messages
• Zoom hosts 208,333 participants in meetings
• Netflix users stream 404K hours of video
• Amazon ships 6,659 packages
• Instagram users post +347K stories
• $3,805 is spent on mobile apps

Very few organizations track data as well as professional sports teams. They employ statisticians, keeping track of just about everything that you can possibly imagine. A basketball team, for example, will keep track of points, minutes played, field
goal percentages, assists, 3-point shot percentages, blocked shots, fouls, rebounds, and on and on. The stats of each competitor played will also be closely studied so they know how to match up against that team. Check out the movie Moneyball for an extreme example of this in practice. In business, you must keep track of critical metrics to make sure you are achieving targets, and make adjustments if you don’t.

The obvious metrics include P&L, balance sheet, sales, returns, accounts payable, accounts receivable, cash flow, cost of goods
sold, gross margin, overhead, and so on. But you also need to track the activities that drive the company to these numbers,
such as sales calls, new leads, conversions, throughput, error rate, on-time delivery percentages, customer satisfaction
percentage.

Every company needs to decide which items to monitor on their team scorecard and must check up on each item weekly. If these
are not closely watched, it is easy to get off track and then end up with a specific quarter or the year below target when it is too
late to fix it. Some companies only keep track of qualitative metrics with a few quantitative ones, instead of monitoring several quantitative metrics regularly.

What happens when a company is not hitting the targets on their team scorecard? That is when they need to add those specific
metrics to their list of opportunities and challenges. See the Surmani Business Coaching chapter on “Tackling Opportunities & Challenges in your Organization” later in this eBook for more information on how to address these issues and stop them in their tracks.

A new Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey of more than 600 senior executives finds that 55% of organizations agree
that data analytics for decision making is extremely important today, and 92% assert it will be even more important two years from now.

Stop the guessing game and focus on the real numbers and data that drives your business. If you can achieve this, you will be well
on the road to results and success for your organization.