Our weekly scorecard contains too many metrics that we can only measure after the week is over, making it impossible to pivot. What is an example of an operational leading indicator we can track on Tuesday that tells us whether our Friday delivery targets will be met?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

If you are only looking at numbers on Monday that tell you what happened last week, you are driving your business by looking in the rearview mirror. To run a proactive operation, you need weekly leading indicators that give you an early warning signal mid-week so you can course-correct before the damage is done.

A great example of an operational leading indicator for a service-delivery or manufacturing business is task initiation or component readiness, tracked early in the weekly cycle. Let us say your team must deliver ten completed client projects every Friday. A trailing indicator is projects delivered on Friday. A leading indicator you can track on Tuesday is the percentage of project briefs fully approved by the client and assigned to team members.

If your Tuesday scorecard shows that only three out of ten project briefs are ready, you know immediately that you are highly unlikely to hit your Friday delivery target. This gives your operations manager three full days to adjust resources, contact clients, or reassign work to clear the bottleneck.

Another strong Tuesday metric is raw material availability or team capacity scheduled for the upcoming three days. By tracking these numbers early in the week, you can anticipate resource constraints. If the number is red on Tuesday, you drop it down to IDS® immediately during your level ten meeting or prep, giving your team a chance to solve the issue before it shows up as a red metric on next week's leadership scorecard.