In 2021 we made one rule for the firm: no engagement starts until the client and we have agreed, in writing, the single number it will be judged on. Not a set of objectives. Not a balanced scorecard. One figure, with its unit, its baseline and the date it will be read.
Five years and sixty-four engagements later the rule has cost us work, three prospective clients declined to name a number and went elsewhere, and it has produced the only honest scoreboard we know of in our industry. This piece is about what the rule actually does, day to day, and what it does not.
It ends the argument in week one instead of week forty
The typical transformation programme discovers in its last quarter that finance, the sponsor and the consultants have three different definitions of success. Each is defensible. None was written down. The programme is then judged on whichever definition the loudest person in the room holds, which is to say it is not judged at all.
Writing the number down moves that argument to week one, when it is cheap. It is not a pleasant week. In roughly a third of our audits the client’s first proposed number turns out to be unmeasurable with the data they have, and we spend a fortnight finding one that is.
19 of 64
audits whose first recommendation was not to hire us
How it was measured
A rota change, a pricing correction, a conversation with a supplier. The rule makes these easier to say, because the number is already agreed and the honest route to it is often not a project.
It makes the boring stage fundable
Nobody puts data foundations in the press release. Nobody funds eight weeks of field definitions and lineage maps for their own sake. But once the number is written down (median hours from claim receipt to first decision, say) the question ‘can we currently measure that?’ has to be answered, and the answer is usually no. The boring stage becomes the obvious first step rather than a plea.
It publishes the failures
Two of our twelve published outcomes are smaller than the client hoped for. They are on the site because that is what publishing means. A firm that only shows the numbers it likes has a marketing page, not a record, and a board deciding whether to hire it deserves to know the difference.
The most valuable slide in the deck was the one that said which two product lines to stop.
Chief Executive, Fennimore Foods
What it does not do
- It does not make the number move. Agreeing it is the start of the work, not a substitute for it.
- It does not protect against a badly chosen number. We have twice agreed a figure that turned out to measure the wrong thing and had to renegotiate it mid-engagement, in writing, again.
- It does not suit every buyer. A firm that wants a strategy without a scoreboard should hire someone else, and we say so.
If you are about to start a programme of any size, try it before you sign anything: one figure, one unit, one baseline, one date. If the room cannot agree, you have learned the most important thing about the programme before spending a pound on it.