Human Capital Analytics: How to Harness the Potential of Your Organization's Greatest Asset

CHAPTER 3

The Measurement Plan

“Measurement always improves performance.”

—Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman1

Once you have completed the process of alignment with your stakeholders, you are ready to put together an action plan for measuring your investment. A good measurement plan will include the following components:

• Definition of the intervention or interventions to be studied
• Measurement map
• Business questions or hypotheses
• Metrics
• Demographics
• Data sources and requirements
• Participant and nonparticipant groups
• Internal and external variables affecting performance
• Project plan with major milestones
• Personnel required to manage the study
• Communication plan for results

A good practice is to pull together your measurement plan directly following the stakeholder meeting and offer to review it with any interested stakeholders.

DEFINING THE INTERVENTION(S)

This part should be relatively easy and is likely something you can do prior to the stakeholder meeting. If your study includes a group of interventions, be sure to clearly define what is and is not included. You may also want to consider selecting a subset of interventions that is representative of a larger program. We worked with a large government agency that wanted to evaluate the impact of hundreds of courses offered to employees for continuing education. We collaborated with the stakeholders and created a process to select a sample of courses that represented the larger investment. Criteria included such factors as number ...