M6A1: Continuing Your Solution Proposal: Your Measurement Plan

In working toward our final solution proposal you have completed your problem identification, composed an annotated bibliography summarizing research which supports your solution, conducted a stakeholder analysis, and devised a solution plan with a for your problem. Remember, in order to persuade the pertinent stakeholders to implement your plan, you need a clear way to measure the effectiveness of your solution once it is implemented. This plan needs to provide a systematic evaluation of how you will measure the outcomes of your solution plan. See your module notes and the information below for guidelines on this section of your final solution proposal.

Measurement plans can often be a bit tricky. Your outcome variable is tied to your solution, so it should produce results that are measurable as noted in the notes for this module. There are five main points to measuring outcomes:

Goal: This should be a specific factor impacted by your solution. Be succinct.
Performance measurement: What exactly are you measuring?
Benchmark: This is archival data which you will be comparing your solution’s success to.
Target: How effective your solution will be compared to your benchmark data.
Data Collection Plan: How will you gather your data? Depending on your solution and outcome variable, this may be a survey, an interview, a measure of productivity (units or costs), etc.
If you are working to increase customer satisfaction (Goal), you might pull older data gathered from a customer satisfaction survey or the number of negative calls you received from customers in the past (Performance Measurement and Benchmark). Let’s say the goal of your solution is to reduce the number of complaint calls by 10% (Target). Once you implement your solution, you would again measure the number of complaint calls you receive (Data Collection Plan). If that amount of reduction is equal to or greater than 10%, your solution was successful.

Let’s say your goal was to increase employee satisfaction by 30% (Goal and Target). You would pull previously gathered satisfaction data, which could have been gathered through surveys or interviews with employees (Performance Measurement and Benchmark), implement your solution, and use the same instrument to gather the data following your solution implementation (Data Collection Plan). If the scores were 30% higher than the old data, your solution was a success. What happens if there is no archival data? Survey or interview your employees prior to the solution implementation (Performance Measurement and Benchmark) and then survey them afterwards (Data Collection Plan).

Suppose your solution is to cut inventory costs by 20% (Goal and Target). Your organization should have data about the amount of inventory costs prior to your solution’s implementation (Benchmark). Again, measure the inventory costs after implementation and determine if you have met your goal of 20% cost reduction (Data Collection Plan).

Although our plans do not always meet our expectations, without a plan to determine how we are going to measure success of our solution it is meaningless. Do reach out to your instructor if you are having any difficulties creating your measurement plan.

Here is a sample of a plan to measure the effectiveness of crop competitiveness:

https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Specialty_Crop_Competitiveness_Grants/pdfs/Developing_Measure_Outcomes.pdf (Links to an external site.)

Here is an example of how to measure a service provider project success:

http://www.ala.org/pla/sites/ala.org.pla/files/content/onlinelearning/webinars/archive/2017-01-12_Outcome-Measurement-Made-Easy_PO-Webinar_FINAL.pdf