Your index quarterly
How do you keep it? The ECI becomes a quarterly read, so you keep the speed you have gained rather than lose it again over the next year.
What it is
The Build moves the dimension that was holding the others back. Sustain makes sure it stays moved.
Speed leaks back in quietly. A new initiative arrives before the last one has landed. A decision gets reopened because the person who owned it has moved on. A senior team that cleared its diary for direction finds it filling with arbitration again. None of it shows up on a plan, and by the time it shows up in the numbers, a year has gone.
A quarterly read catches it while it is still small.
What each read covers
The same signals that produced your Baseline, taken by the same route, so each quarter can be set against the last.
Not everything is re-collected every quarter. Most signals move fast enough to be worth reading each quarter. A few move slowly, and are read every six months or once a year instead. Collecting everything every quarter adds cost without adding information, and is the quickest way to make the read a burden nobody wants to keep.
Each number carries a note of how it was collected: from your own records, from a measure that moves with it, or from your team’s own account. Over time the aim is to move more of the read onto your own records, so it gets sharper and lighter at the same time.
What you get
Where you stand. All four dimensions, scored and set against your Baseline and the quarter before.
What has moved. Reported signal by signal, not as one headline number. Three signals moving together is evidence. A two-point shift in an overall score is noise.
What is starting to slip. The early signs, named while they are still cheap to fix.
What to watch next. The two or three signals where better evidence would change the picture most.
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And where something has gone backwards, we say so, and say why.
What it asks of you
Less than the Baseline did. The read is drawn mostly from records your company already keeps, and the questions that need people’s time are only asked when the signal they measure is due.
It should sit inside the rhythm you already have, not alongside it as another thing to carry.
When it is not the right thing
If you have not measured, there is nothing to sustain yet. Start with the Baseline.
If the Build has only just finished, wait for the quarter to turn. The day-ninety measures are your first read.
Common questions
Do we have to run the Build with you first?
No. Some clients run the Build with their own people. The quarterly read works the same way either way, because it measures the same signals.
Why quarterly?
It is long enough for the signals to move and short enough to catch a slip before it costs you a year.
Does it carry on for ever?
No. It runs for as long as it is telling you something useful.