Angela,
Two things: First, the metrics are much the same as in a manufacturing or other production environment: money, defects, first pass yield, defect rate, etc. Second, don’t forget to apply Lean.
The hard part is often getting people to actually care about measuring these things. Office people often tend to think in terms of “I need to review/do it manually to make sure it’s right,” or “My work isn’t COPQ” (even if it’s 95% rework). You’ll need leadership support, and you’ll need good political skills to overcome the cultural challenges.
You’ve got to think of it like a factory. Everything that is produced should have a customer. Everything that has to get fixed is a defect and rework. Everything that has to be reviewed, that’s COPQ. All the time that a document is sitting around in somebody’s inbox or on their desk has a cost associated with it. Every time someone has to take or make a call to a customer/vendor that isn’t for a new order, the process didn’t work (there are exceptions, but the tendency is not to classify callbacks as waste when they really should be.)
So how do you measure? If there’s any paper floating around, you’ll need people to manually help measure. Follow the flow of documents, and manually capture a sampling. Anywhere you can, capture date/time and other info electonically. A good place to start is wherever you have the most people doing pretty much the same thing, and where lots of dollars flow through – perhaps in billing, receivables, collections, or payables. Again, go back to the basic metrics I mentioned earlier. You’ll have to figure out what is a defect and what is rework for your specific processes.
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