Measure the performance and improve
Measure and monitor performance against your success measures and key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Establish success measures for your product or service.
- Plan how you will measure and monitor the performance of your product or service, including allocation of resources for monitoring and continuous improvement.
- Implement a process to monitor the performance of your product or service.
- Use the performance information to improve your product or service.
Every service must aim for continuous improvement. Metrics are an important starting point for discussions about a services strengths and weaknesses. By identifying and capturing the right metrics with the right tools you can make sure all your decisions to improve the service are supported by data.
Key performance indicators
Services should aim to measure the following KPIs:
- user satisfaction—to help continually improve the user experience of your service
- digital take-up—to show how many people are using the service and to help encourage users to choose the digital service
- completion rate—to show which parts of the service you need to fix
- cost per transaction—to make your service more cost efficient (where possible).
There will be other metrics your service could measure and monitor to understand how it is performing, such as:
- error rates
- time to completion
- costs, benefits and return on investment
- content metrics (readability, length).
In Discovery stage
You'll have started early measurement activity during Discovery stage with your user research.
You will need to consider how you'll measure your service in more detail as you enter Alpha stage.
By the end of Alpha you should have:
- explored the data that is already available for an existing service, where it is kept and how you might access and use it, and also shared your own insights
- collected baseline data for the service operation in all of its channels
- estimated the number of people you expect to use the service
- started creating a performance framework outlining your objectives and what metrics your team will use to demonstrate you meet them
- considered the metrics you will need to measure your KPIs and where the data will come from.
In Beta stage
By the end of Beta stage you will be able to show:
- which metrics and measurements you will use to monitor your KPIs
- the baseline measures and the benchmarks for success
- which tools you use for analysis and web analytics in Beta (and Alpha if appropriate)
- what you have learned from qualitative and quantitative data (for example, key evidence).
During the public Beta stage, you'll have been able to test your methods for data collection and validated that the data is accurate.
As you go live you should monitor your service performance data for continuous improvement.
Your data should show:
- user satisfaction has increased
- digital take-up is increasing in line with service plans
- completion rate has been maintained
- cost per transaction is decreasing in line with service plans.