{"id":20728,"date":"2022-11-08T12:40:41","date_gmt":"2022-11-08T12:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/?p=20728"},"modified":"2022-11-08T12:42:58","modified_gmt":"2022-11-08T12:42:58","slug":"beyond-good-setting-and-working-towards-a-more-ambitious-baseline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/2022\/11\/08\/beyond-good-setting-and-working-towards-a-more-ambitious-baseline\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond \u2018good\u2019: setting and working towards a more ambitious baseline"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

External and internal benchmarks often differ. Solutions Analyst Mike Hicks, Principal Solutions Architect at Cisco ThousandEyes, explores how a business\u2019s benchmark of \u2018good\u2019 can limit innovation and competitiveness.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Solutions Analyst Mike Hicks, Principal Solutions Architect at Cisco ThousandEyes<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Network and application teams that fear they fall short of industry benchmarks for performance, resiliency, stability, usage or other metrics will be familiar with a common corrective action: drawing a line in the sand, establishing \u2018what good looks like\u2019 and then working to get there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether this definition of \u2018good\u2019 is enough to raise a team or organisation\u2019s output up to where it needs to be to properly succeed in today\u2019s economic environment is a hot topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The business market is hyper-competitive. Market leaders haven\u2019t gotten where they are by striving to meet basic measures of performance or success. They\u2019re there because they set the standard for others to live up to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In that way, being \u2018good\u2019 does not imply being \u2018best-in-class\u2019. That\u2019s been the case for over 100 years: in scenario planning models like \u2018good, better, best\u2019, the \u2018good\u2019 option is the least ambitious of the three. Defining what \u2018good\u2019 looks like might be a first step to improvement, but it\u2019s a starting point, not an end state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the challenge for any team or organisation that is trying to set themselves up on a trajectory of improvement and growth. It\u2019s not enough to be \u2018good\u2019 anymore. There\u2019s a need to be better than \u2018good\u2019. Only by continuously getting better, can organisations and teams become the \u2018best\u2019 in their respective fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A new standard needs to be set that can evolve with changing business and economic conditions and that standard needs to be underpinned by end-to-end visibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reaching for \u2018good\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Defining what \u2018good\u2019 looks like is an important first step on the journey, but teams and organisations are likely to encounter common obstacles that prevent even \u2018good\u2019 from being achieved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Specifically, organisations and teams are susceptible to missing the mark on \u2018good\u2019 if they lean too heavily on external benchmarks or SLAs as accepted definitions of what \u2018good\u2019 looks like, or if they define \u2018good\u2019 themselves without having data to support their decision-making. It\u2019s worth unpacking both in a bit more detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, there are common industry benchmarks around what is considered to be \u2018good\u2019 \u2013 page loads in under two seconds, latency or ping times within a certain number of milliseconds, no greater than 1% packet loss on a circuit. The list goes on. Some of these were set many years ago, have not evolved since and have lost currency. They\u2019re also \u2018someone else\u2019s\u2019 benchmarks and won\u2019t fit every set of circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SLAs \u2013 Service Level Agreements \u2013 pose much the same problem. They are often set very low to make breaching them difficult and would not match up with an organisation\u2019s own internal definition of what constituted \u2018good\u2019 availability or service. For that reason, their utility as a model for setting a \u2018good\u2019 internal baseline is fairly limited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, where organisations try to set their own baseline instead of using someone else\u2019s, but where they do not have data and visibility to support the internal discussion and decision-making, they risk setting \u2018good\u2019 too low.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Definitions of \u2018good\u2019 can end up becoming watered down by what is internally perceived as realistic and achievable, within a set of known constraints \u2013 financial, time, cultural and so on. While realism is an important input into any discussion, there has to be awareness of how it can work against innovation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The temptation to under-promise and over-deliver may produce a version of \u2018good\u2019 that falls short of internal capabilities, building in a margin for error or disappointment. It may also lead to passive commitments like \u2018best effort\u2019 or \u2018up to\u2019, which are not objectively \u2018good\u2019 standards to aspire to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A visible solution<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The common denominator among organisations and teams that set too low a bar for \u2018what good looks like\u2019 is a lack of visibility into their operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, organisations that display a lack of vision to strive for continuous improvement – to become \u2018better\u2019 or the \u2018best\u2019 \u2013 may also be suffering from a lack of visibility. Executives may not be confident to set higher standards if they\u2019re unsure these standards are achievable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Put simply: You need to know exactly what you\u2019re working with to know where you can improve. That visibility will also help you measure the relative success of uplift measures and provide rolling feedback on how you can constantly improve and keep raising the bar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think of it in an e-commerce context. With constant visibility, teams and organisations can understand how often they can push new features or changes and the impact this has on customer behaviour. When the customer experience improves, they sell more and that creates revenue and competitive advantage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being \u2018good\u2019 is no longer good enough. Visibility is the gateway to continuous improvement and ultimately to becoming best-in-class.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

External and internal benchmarks often differ. Solutions Analyst Mike Hicks, Principal Solutions Architect at Cisco ThousandEyes, explores how a business\u2019s benchmark of \u2018good\u2019 can limit innovation and competitiveness. Network and application teams that fear they fall short of industry benchmarks for performance, resiliency, stability, usage or other metrics will be familiar with a common corrective […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":20733,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1576,44],"tags":[2514,2513],"class_list":["post-20728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis-insights","category-top-stories","tag-cisco-thousandeyes","tag-mike-hicks"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20728"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20737,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20728\/revisions\/20737"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}