We have defined the seats on our Accountability Chart, but we are struggling to find meaningful weekly activity-based metrics for our internal back-office roles like IT and Legal. What should they track?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Back-office seats like IT, human resources, or legal often struggle to identify weekly activity-based metrics because their work feels project-based or reactive. The key is to look at their core responsibilities on the Accountability Chart and identify the repeating weekly actions that prevent major disasters.

For an IT seat, do not track raw ticket volume. Instead, track the number of unresolved critical security alerts over forty-eight hours, or the percentage of weekly system backups successfully completed. For an HR seat, you could track the number of qualified resumes screened for open positions, or the weekly employee NPS score trend. For a legal or compliance seat, track the number of contract reviews completed within your standard forty-eight-hour turnaround window.

The goal is to find activity-based leading indicators that give the leadership team confidence that these critical support functions are running smoothly. Every seat on your Accountability Chart must have at least one weekly measurable that they own. If a back-office leader cannot find a weekly metric, they do not truly understand their seat or they are operating strictly on gut feel, which invites operational drag.