Daniel Hayward

Every week, Amazon executives get together and discusses 400-500 metrics in 60 minutes.

That's 9 seconds a slide for an hour straight and it provides enough value that they've been doing it for years.

Actually, some of these slides are 3 seconds and others are 30. It depends whether there is anything to report. Looking at them each week gives them good familiarity for when there is something to report.

There are some things about Amazon I hate (they have an outsized negative impact on warehouse safety in America). I'm not going to deny that they are profitable. This practice might be a big part of “why.”

Translating this to a small contractor (which relative to Amazon, your business is small), 400 metrics would be insanity.

What wouldn't be crazy is to look at how they got to that many metrics. For each department they have done their level best to identify causal metrics for specific outcomes.

And they continue to iterate and work on this.

Example:

If you're trying to get more customers (who isn't?), then you might identify that bids need to go out more often. After you think about it for a while and track that, you might realize that there's something upstream of bids going out.

You aren't getting invited to bid as much as you would like (or aren't getting invited by the right folks). And then you would do the work of identifying the causal metric for that and start reporting it.

So then we come to where I had intended to write from the beginning, which is, what should I put in a dashboard? Sometimes I see dashboards or desire for dashboards for no other reason than “I want to be data driven.”

Mimicking someone before you have any understanding of why isn't going to get you where you want to go.

If you're going to make a point of tracking expenses, revenue, hours, incidents, close calls, win rates, overhead, margin, schedule variance, equipment downtime, then have a reason!

What are you actually trying to accomplish? Is spending the time tracking actually getting you what you want?

Full article:https://commoncog.com/the-amazon-weekly-business-review/