Our next section of the vision and scope document to talk about is success metrics. So what are success metrics? success metrics are? How do we know project was successful, that we accomplished what we wanted to accomplish. Success metric is not just a vague statement of something we want to do. It's an actual, measurable, quantifiable thing.

And it also has to be attainable. So think of them as something that has to be able to be tracked or confirmed. So data that can be obtained but is not made up. So for instance, if calls being reduced by 20% can only be attained if the person's organization is tracking the number of calls coming in and they're not tracking them, then that's not something that you're able to put in there, even though that's what you want. You want calls to be reduced by 20%. But how do you know what that is?

If you're not tracking calls today, so you have no way of knowing if you're going to reduce it by 20%, if you have no way to track that, so it has to be something that you're able to track. So make sure that when the success metrics are being added, here, they're things that can be known. And the best way to accomplish that is to ask the question of the stakeholder that is giving you the success metrics. Or if you're documenting them, then make sure that there is a way to track those things and verify them. Rather than just saying this sounds like a good success metric, because it very well may be a good one, but there's no way to confirm it. So let's go ahead and take a look at some success metrics that we have for this project that we've already looked at the background, the business opportunity and the business objectives for and let's talk about the success metrics.

So the first one that we have here in the document is success metric one, at time of initial launch, the North America region will have one website used by all customers and prospective customers. So there's one thing here that I feel like stated a little bit earlier. So when we say, at the time of initial launch, that's great, because we don't know yet when this is going to launch, we're just doing the vision and scope. The project is just starting, there's no way to know what date it's actually going to be implemented. So it's fine to say at time of initial launch, when you're referring to that type of thing for a success metric. So the metric that is actually being defined here is that North America have one website that's used by all customers and prospective customers.

So that's great. From the perspective of the site, we know that we want to take our three sites down to one site. So we When we launch, we basically want those other three sites to be shut down. This is the only site that the North America region will have. The other thing that I think should be clarified here is the end of the statement where we say, used by all customers and prospective customers, we know that we have other global regions outside of North America. So this could be a little bit more detailed, if we said, used by all North America customers and prospective customers, just to clarify that we don't expect all global regions customers to use our North America site, we only expect that to be used by North America customers.

Our next one is SM two which says within 12 months of initial launch, all regions will have one website per region. So this is a good way of putting this because again, remember, we don't know when we're going to launch North America. We just know that North America is going to be the first one launched, it's okay to say that within a timeframe from the initial launch, we want all launches complete, as long as you're not dictating when that initial launches. So by saying within 12 months of the initial launch, that's something that's measurable. So if, for example, the new site gets launched in September, it's measurable, to be able to say by the next September, okay, do we have all regions done or all regions now on their own one site and there aren't multiple sites for any of the other regions? That's a quantifiable thing to be able to say yes or no to to say all of the regions do or you know what Europe actually hasn't been completed yet.

They still have two websites or three websites. Okay. Then we missed that success metric. We did not do this in the timeframe that we said because we are now 12 months from initial launch and we still have a region that hasn't been completed yet. So we missed the mark on that success metric. Now let's look at our third one.

Our third one says all sites will use a minimum of 80% General content with a maximum of 20% custom content. So how could this be a little bit better? How can we make it specific but less wordy? So what we're saying here is that they want all of our regions to basically use the same content as much as possible, knowing that they'll be about a 20% difference in content on each of the regions websites. So using our framework from North America, using the words the content, the pictures, all of that that's on the North America site, they want them to use 80% of that and only customize 20% of content on each of their sites for each of the regions. So we could change this to just say, all sites will use a maximum of 20% custom content.

So that implies right there that the rest of the content will be general, there's no need to say it. So rather than being wordy with that, you could take that down to just say all sites will use a maximum of 20% custom content. So that makes your success metric less wordy, but still basically says the same thing. So that's a way that you could change that wording to be a little bit more direct and what you're saying there. And again, that's a quantifiable thing to be able to see that there is only a 20% difference in the content on a site versus a site is completely different, or 50%. Different that is something that would be able to be verified.

And I want to take a second here to just talk about The VA kind of steering the conversation. So again, we've talked about that pretty much in every section here. So if you are not creating the document, and you're getting the information from the stakeholder, and you get the success metrics that are vague leave room for interpretation, things like that, then it's up to you to go back to that stakeholder and explain to them that success metrics need to be things that are quantifiable, and that can be tracked. So you're helping them better articulate their success metrics. I have seen success metrics in the past that have said things like we want to increase the number of sales that we have, if the sales increased by one you could say that success metric was met because there's no number given there. There's nothing quantifiable there to say what it is that you want to increase it by.

So if that's a goal to increase sales, then you want to say, we want to increase sales by 5% per month by 20% per year by 20 customers per month, however it is that you want to be able to gauge that you want to put something behind that that you're able to track. Now, again, you would want to make sure that that is trackable that right now, we know how many customers we have. So this goes back to the thing I was saying earlier about when you get success metrics. The other thing that you want to do is ask that stakeholder about those. So if you got one that said we want to increase our customer base by 20%, in the next 12 months, that is a really good success metric. It tells you the timeframe, and it tells you the percentage.

So what you can say to the stakeholder to make sure that success metric is verifiable is that you could ask them how we're tracking the number of customers we have today. And if they can't tell do that, then they need to go find that out if that's being tracked anywhere, so that we actually can verify that success metric, a same thing here. If we're saying all sites will use a minimum of 80%, General content maximum of 20%. And maybe they've taken your suggestion and updated that to just say all sites will use a maximum of 20% custom content, then you can ask, how will we be able to verify that? How will we know that they're only using 20% and make sure they have an idea way of knowing that they can actually track that. So that is a combination of you looking at the success metrics that you were given, and notating where things are too vague, and then helping them with rewarding those things and coming up with something that's more verifiable and then also checking with them to make sure that there is in fact actually a way to verify those things.

So those are two jobs that you kind of have related to the success metrics to help ensure that they are clear and concise and complete.