Analytics best practices from PG&E's Janet Lee Redmond and Ramelle Ruff

Reflecting further on the 2012 SAP for Utilities conference, we enjoyed the presentation by Pacific Gas & Electric's Janet Lee Redmond and Ramelle Ruff on analytics best practices. While the context was HR efficiency, Janet's and Ramelle's points were clearly applicable to many types of operations and projects. Our key take aways included the following:

• Fewer metrics are better; they're more manageable by their owners, and digestible by the intended audience.
• Choose metrics that truly measure the success of key business processes. While some extra data may be nice to have, that can get noisy and obscure what's actually important.
• Pick benchmarks related to your business, but consider those from outside your industry as well.
• Avoid the "we are special" mentality that often leads to exemptions and non-standard measurements. Do this by collaborating across stakeholders and ensuring buy-in from the beginning.
• Assign owners to each metric, to maintain their integrity over time. Good governance is key to enduring value here.
• Define how data will be presented and strive to eliminate manual manipulation, which will lead to additional versions reports and make periodic comparisons or comparisons across departments and users far more difficult.
• Last, define the frequency of evaluations and updates to your metrics. Ad hoc or reactive approaches will just lead to data that can't be properly compared from one period to the next.