The rapid advances in technology can present challenges to organisations that aim to be at the ‘cutting edge’. Many feel compelled to incorporate the latest technology into their activities or services – for example, on their web sites in order to be seen as leaders, instead of making the changes because they have assessed the need for such updates, and identified benefits for users.
In addition, there is little or no assessment of the effect these reactive changes have had once the product, service or web site is in the marketplace or the systems change made.
In my experience, many companies simply have no idea whether the latest brainwave was an improvement on what was there before, or whether it has actually made a product or web site less usable.
Organisations rarely monitor the impact of changes or upgrades, and it means that there is no opportunity to learn from mistakes, or from successes.
Another common mistake is thinking that the development process is over once a product has been released or a web site launched.
Monitoring its progress and knowing why it is successful is of great help when considering improvements, redesigning or even new products.
If a product proves to be a runaway success in the marketplace, but the organisation doesn’t know whether this is due to, for example, a superior user interface, a more attractive design, or more competitive pricing, then they will be unable to reproduce this success with other products or in other areas.
The first step is to identify key performance indicators
(KPIs) in advance, and monitor them throughout the development
process as well as after the launch into the marketplace.
Where possible, KPIs should be tied into business strategies
to ensure that any work undertaken is contributing to the
company’s
overall plans.
Part of our job is to help an organisation answer the question ‘How will this new or redesigned product or web site help our business?’, thus helping achieve good returns on the investment.
Applying benchmarks to measurables such as customer relationship management data; resource management; usage data; revenue; costs; or customer satisfaction, for example, not only helps get the right product or web site to the marketplace, but can also make the development process quicker, easier and more cost-effective, especially in the long-term.
For example, we recently worked with an organisation that had re-developed its web site to allow online sign-up to its services.
Encouraging online sign-up was an important part of its business development plans, partly to expand its traditional marketplace and partly to reduce the demands on its call centre and the associated costs. The organisation therefore closely monitored the progress of the new process.
It quickly became apparent that the rate of sign-up was much lower than it had predicted, with a high percentage of visitors who had commenced the process not completing it. The call centre was still handling the majority of transactions, at some cost to the organisation.
After holding focus groups to identify why the sign-up process wasn’t being completed, the organisation was able to implement changes. As a result, the percentage of completed online sign-ups rose by 35 percent, providing significant cost benefits.
However, if the organisation hadn’t monitored the web site following its implementation, the online sign-up process would not have achieved its goal, without the organisation knowing why, which means that the resources that went into its development would have been wasted.
If the organisation doesn’t know how successful an initiative has been, then there is no opportunity to celebrate wins and congratulate the team involved.
Instead of the development process being interesting and challenging, it becomes routine and unrewarding, with no incentive to come up with new and helpful ideas.
