Establishing Benchmarks for your MDM Strategy Team

Strategically placed milestones and benchmarks can make a huge difference to the success of your Master Data Management team. All endeavors benefit from motivation. A large project that impacts your entire organization such as an MDM solution is no exception. You need to have some quick wins scattered throughout the project to prove value early on.

What’s the Impact of a Milestone?

This is both for executives and team members. It’s easy to get discouraged when you are working on a big, seemingly never-ending project. That’s what it’s so important to celebrate and acknowledge milestones to remind yourself that you’re making progress and that there is value in what you’re working toward.

Keep in mind that in order to achieve those two objectives, they have to be valid and meaningful milestones. This is not a way for you to “fake out” others and let them think good things are happening. These milestones need to be items that confirm, accurately, that you are making a difference.

MDM Benchmarks should be strategic and achievable objectives that showcase the potential benefits of your MDM strategy. Ideally each milestone will build off of the last in an upward climb. Large milestones should hinge on progress which will have a KPI. This makes it clear that your milestone will have a measurable and beneficial impact.

Milestones should be encouraging to both the project team and executive level stakeholders. Make sure to tactically place them throughout the life of the project for consistent momentum.

What are MDM KPIs?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for MDM projects are created to measure the accuracy and effectiveness of your data processes. You work toward milestones and benchmarks and quantify your success with metrics and KPIs.

KPIs continue to be utilized long after project completion. They become a regular part of monitoring your departments. Use MDM KPIs to analyze and assess the flow of data and the trends of internal and external data integrity. Monitoring your data moving forward has to be a top priority for your MDM team.

This way they can quickly identify data quality issues and pinpoint specific root causes that create them. This contributes to reduced operating costs as well as increased customer satisfaction.

Some example MDM KPIs are:

• Percentage of Duplicate Data

• Cycle Time for New Customer set up

• Error Rate in data record

• Mean time to repair data issues

• Percentage current accounts with incomplete data

• Average Database availability time

There are many more options and you will have to talk with your team to come up with the best KPIs to help meet your objectives. This should be done very early in the project as your MDM strategy should be built off of your data needs. Your KPIs should be indicative of those needs.

MDM is a Project That Never Ends

Something to keep in mind — MDM is a project and in many ways should be evaluated as such through milestones, KPIs, defined roles and a project manager. But a very important piece of information to remember is that when the MDM solution is implemented, the project isn’t over.

For true Information Management (IM) you need to be constantly vigilant. Even with an MDM solution data can get out of control and become useless to your organization if it’s not monitored and controlled. The key to a successful MDM is all about continuing to follow, and improve, the process.

If you’d like more information about implementing your own MDM solution check out our ebook, or some of our previous blogs. You can also always connect with us here at Aspirant!