Week 6 - Ascend your Startup

One of the toughest parts of managing business growth is quality assurance, and this is particularly difficult for young companies.  I’ve been mostly blogging about establishing, marketing and delivering a minimum viable product (MVP) for these companies – but eventually you’ll need to move on to specialized or niche products as well.  The same self-monitoring rules apply to future rollouts as that for the MVP.  There needs to accountability measures in place to ensure ongoing quality controls, as well as feedback mechanisms to “adjust fire” when needed.



Ascend your Startup recommends using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to establish targets and milestones for ongoing operations.  The principle is to create business objectives that align with, and further, your long-term business strategy while creating related, functional-area metrics (based on results, feedback or outputs) that indicate success on the way toward said objective.

This parallels how I’ve been taught program management quality assurance in the past.  We didn’t use OKRs, however.  I prefer to organize the “progress bar” into separate categories, or “lines of effort”.  The success milestones on each are quantifiable metrics in two categories: performance and effectiveness.  While similar, these terms are not interchangeable (more about that here).  These correlate well to the concepts of OKRs, with a clearer picture of successful progress versus stagnation.  Measures of Performance, or MOPs, are usually representative of how well you (or your organization) are executing a particular program.  For example, I’d track compliance with Army directed continuing education (CE) requirements as a measure of performance (how well are we following our plan).  A parallel Measure of Effectiveness (MOE) would be “What percentage of medics have successfully recertified their licensure”, since goal of the CE program is to prepare them for recertification.  On the business side of things, we could set a MOP toward how many advertisements were presented to potential customers, with corresponding MOEs as the volume or traffic toward the advertised service or number of orders generated from said traffic.




If you’re at all curious about integrated the MOP/MOE concept, a decent rundown can be found at the link below:

Understanding Measures of Performance and Measures of Effectiveness


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