Master Measures (Webinar 36)

Hello everyone, and welcome to the I Didn't Know clearpoint Could do that webinar series. Today we're discussing clearpoint's newest addition to skyrocket efficiency and consistency in your account, and that is Master Measures. Now, before we explain exactly what those are and how they can help you, here are your smiling hosts. I'm Kathryn.

And I'm Tricia.

And as a few housekeeping announcements, we will be recording this session and we'll make it available within a week. The webinar will last about 25 minutes, with time for questions at the end, so you can submit your questions to supportlearpointstrategy.com any that we don't get to at the end we'll follow up with over email. And on our last installment, we introduced our newest version of Clearpoint, which is Clearpoint 11.5. So if you're still getting a feel for all the functionality we've added, I'd highly recommend checking out that recording on.

Our blog, Vimeo channel or support center.

Just search Webinar now today is going to be focused on one of those new features in particular, and that is Master Measures. So we'll start with a little background information. We'll walk through two examples, we'll discuss when you should use Master Measures as opposed to default series, we'll discuss a few more default options that you have available in clearpoint, and then we'll show you how to make adjustments to mastermeasure templates. So again, submit your questions to supportlearpointstrategy.com and we'll get to as many as we can. All right, now let's dive into our Upward Air account, and before we get started, we want to give you a little more background on mastermeasures. So what exactly is a mastermeasure, and how many times can we say that phrase during a webinar? A mastermeasure is a type of template that you can use to apply consistent settings to linked measures across your account. So the MasterMeasure template can determine what series will be tracked in these measures, what calculations those series will have, what evaluation criteria your measure will use, and what charts you have based off of those measure series.

So when should you take advantage of something like that?

Well, because all of these specifications are centrally applied via that MasterMeasure template, you're going to want to use those templates for measures that are all going to be set up the exact same way. So, for example, let's say your account is broken into divisional scorecards, and each division has a revenue measure. And let's say you need those revenue measures configured the exact same way across divisions. Since it's easiest to compare data, create rollup, and set up reports for your executive team. When everything's consistent, you can use a MasterMeasure template in this case to save time setting up each revenue measure and making updates.

And how exactly does it save you time?

Well, for one, instead of setting up calculations, evaluations, and charts for each new revenue measure, all you need to do is link that new revenue measure to your mastermeasure template. And since that template is stored centrally in admin options, departments won't be adjusting calculations and evaluations individually. Which saves you from having to verify down the line whether everyone's revenue measure is still using the same criteria. And lastly, here's the real time saver. Whenever the format of those divisional revenue measures all need the same change. For example, an additional calculated series, all you've got to do is adjust the master measure template once for that change to apply to all of your revenue measures.

Wow, that's awesome. So again, master measures come in handy for a set of measures that you want to keep totally consistent. Right?

And we know it's kind of hard to talk through this without seeing it in action, so let's go ahead and set up some examples and we'll point.

Out these benefits along the way.

Now, master measure templates are set up based on measures in your account. So whether you've already got a measure in mind or you're setting up something new, you'll want to have an existing measure to use as the basis for that template. So going back to our revenue example, we've already got a revenue measure set up here in our Upward Airlines corporate.

Scorecard, and we want to use this.

Format as the basis for all of our divisional revenue measures. So, scrolling down to the table, I can see five series here, two raw series for monthly actual and target data. Got my year to date revenue and the year to date target to match. And then I've also got a variance series subtracting the monthly the monthly target from the monthly actual revenue. Then this measure is also using an automatic evaluation. We've got this set to evaluate based on the best series between our monthly and our year to date revenue. And up top here we've got two charts. We can see our year to date revenue on a quarterly basis, and we've got a gauge chart comparing the monthly revenue to our target. So we want all of our revenue measures to have these exact series and charts across our eastern Central and Western Divisions. And for that, let's set up a Master Measure template. I'm going to go to Admin Options here and under our Enterprise features, we can see Master Measures. So let's click on that and click the plus icon to add a template. So as I mentioned, we're going to select a scorecard and an existing measure from that scorecard. So our Revenue Measure here. And then let's click Save.

Now, here's something important to note. Once you create this MasterMeasure template, it is not linked to the original measure. So even though we use the format of our Revenue measure for this template, changes to the Master Measure itself don't affect the original measure and vice versa. The Master Measure is its own entity now, right?

So we can click to make edits just to this template and make it clear that this is a template. I'm just going to change that name. Then on the Measure Series tab, we can see all of those series with their evaluations and calculations that are going to be applied to any measure we link this template to. And same thing for our charts. So our next step is to link the template to our other revenue measures. But first let's go and take a look at the existing revenue measures we have in our account. So if I click here into the Western Division and take a look at our revenue, I can see that this doesn't really have the format that we want. It's got a really custom chart, Actual and Target series that don't really use those naming conventions in our template, and a percent of Target series that we're not even really tracking right now. So we want to make sure that this format is consistent by linking this to our Revenue Master Measure template. There is a place to do this right from the Edit Measure window, but to show you a shortcut, I'm going to go back into admin options and link this measure right from our template. So I'll click to edit the Revenue template, go to the Measures tab, and I'll click to add new Linked Measures.

Linked Measures are going to be any measure in the account that we want to have using the same structure of the Master Measure template.

Right. So going through these now. First I'm going to go select my revenue measure from the Eastern Division, then from the Central Division and the Western Division to make sure that they all have that same format applied through our template. So I'll click on Linked Measures and here we can see all three. And now that we've created that link, let's go back and look at our Revenue measure in the Western division again. So now in our data table we can see that we've got a bunch of new series created. My MasterMeasure series are added here at the end. And we do still have these original series that were here in this measure to begin with. So let's just do a little cleanup to get rid of those default series now, because our calculations and evaluations here are going to be based off of our Master series. I just want to copy this data over to our standardized monthly revenue and target revenue series. And then when we click Save, we're going to see our evaluation change and we're going to see all of our calculations populate here too. And if we click into the Edit Measure window, we've got a really easy way to differentiate between those series and those Master Measure series if we go to our Measure Series tab. So here we can see all of the Master series are labeled in orange. We don't have the option to delete or edit them so that everything stays consistent. We can disable them if we need to, which we'll come back to later in the webinar. And for now let's go ahead and just take out those default series that don't apply to our templated format. Great. So now we've got those exact same series as our template for this linked measure and same thing with our chart. So we've got two Master charts here set up that would be edited centrally through the template and we'll go ahead and just delete that other chart. So we'll click save. And just one final change here.

We.

Will pull out those master charts onto the detail page. Alright, and this is what our cleaned up final version looks like, just like our original MasterMeasure template. Now, whenever we acquire a new division, I can easily add a revenue measure with this exact same format. And as you can see here, if I double click on any element from the mastermeasure, we'll see that it has to be edited through admin options. So everything's going to stay consistent. Now you're probably wondering what are some other scenarios where you can take advantage of Master Measures?

Great question, Kathryn. So another great example of a way to use Master measures is with citizen satisfaction survey measures. A lot of municipalities have citizen satisfaction surveys that they distribute and record data from once a year.

And it's likely that many of those survey questions are going to be formatted to have the same options like a five point scale ranging from most dissatisfied to most satisfied. So setting up a master measure with those Responses as series would be a great way to standardize those measures exactly.

And this can allow for standardization of charts and evaluations in clearpoints as well. So let's go ahead and navigate to our Citizen Satisfaction Survey template that we have set up in our account. So I can scroll down and click into this here. And you can see here I have a couple of charts and data filled in this data table. And this is just a template, but we added in some dummy data just to make sure our charts are formatting exactly how we would like. So in the measured data table, you can see that we have series for the five different responses from very satisfied to very dissatisfied, as well as a couple of calculated series for the total and percentage of each response. If we scroll up, we can see our two charts. The first is a pie chart that displays the percentage for each answer given for a survey question. And the second chart is a bar chart that compares the number of responses from each answer and how this has changed over time. Lastly, we have an evaluation set up based off of our Very Satisfied series. Wow.

We're not even including satisfied responses in that evaluation.

What can I say? I'm a perfectionist. Now that we have our survey template perfectly set up, we want to set up all other newly added survey measures to be exactly like this one. So we're going to add another master measure. To do this, I'll go under System Settings, Admin Options, and again click into Master Measures.

Here.

I'll add a new MasterMeasure template and this time I'll select the Citizen Satisfaction Survey that we are just looking at. I can go ahead and save. And again I'll rename this to make it clear. This is a template we can see the evaluation this will be using as well as the series and the two charts. So now that we have this saved, I can go ahead and add a measure from my Citizen Satisfaction Survey that we conducted this year. So to do this, I'll go under Manage Measures and I will add a new measure that we recorded data from this year in our Citizen Satisfaction Survey. So once I have the name typed out here, the next step is to link to my master measure. So as we saw Katherine do this from admin options, we can also do this from the edit window when we're adding a new measure. So I can click this drop down. And here I can click on the Citizen Satisfaction Survey template that we just created. And I'm also going to set my reporting frequency to annual since we only conduct this survey once a year. So I'll Go ahead and save and click into our new measure. Now I can see one of our measures is here, but I'm going to go ahead and edit the layout to pull out both of the mastermeasure charts. So when I scroll down here in the data table, I can see the series from our master measure, the responses and their percentages. I can also see the actual and target default series. Since we know we don't need to use these actual and target series in our measure, we can go ahead and edit our measure and remove these as we previously saw Kathryn do. Under the Measure Series tab, I'll select both of these to remove them. You can see now I'm left with the only the mastermeasure series. I'm going to do the same thing with my chart deleting the default option here and I can go ahead and save. So now that our measure is cleaned up and our data table is ready to go, I can go ahead and enter in my data from this year. So once this is entered and I save, I can see that my charts have both populated with my information from this year and my measure is now evaluating at the overall level.

Awesome. So we've got an evaluation, tons of calculations and multiple charts with pretty little effort. So you might be wondering whether you should be using MasterMeasure templates all the time for everything. It might appear that they are interchangeable with or even better than default series. But looks are deceiving and there are separate use cases for when you should be relying on a MasterMeasure template versus default series. So let's just refresh everyone's memory on default series first. So this setup component can be found in admin options here in the top right. And unsurprisingly, these are the series that show up by default when you create a new measure. So that's going to include the name, the series order here, and the series data type. So your default series are a template sort of of their own that is flexible and easy to change. Default series are a better option than Master Measures then in organizations and scenarios where your measures are not perfectly similar. So once you've added default series, you can easily adjust measures individually. You can change these default series without disrupting previously created measures. They're really meant to serve as a flexible basis for the information in your account.

By contrast, when you use Master Measures, you should not be expecting to make tweaks and changes individually to those linked measures. The whole idea behind leveraging a master measure is that changes would have to be applied centrally by the administrator to make sure that results are kept consistent.

Right? So you'll want to reserve Master Measures for instances where your linked measures are not expected to change separately and where that rigidity becomes an advantage. Now, of course, Default Series and Master Measures series are bound to meet since, as you saw with Tricia's new survey measure, when you link a new measure to a Master Measure template, those default theories are already going to be in in place. And one important note to keep in mind there is that the series names in clearpoint measures do still need to be unique. So just be aware that if you do repeat Default series names in a MasterMeasure template, ClearPoint is going to differentiate the Master Series name by adding a suffix like one at the end.

Now, you might be wondering what other defaults you can set up in clearpoint to save you a little time. Another great default option is setting up the default layouts for Elements. This means that all detail pages that are newly added are going to show the same fields and types of information. You can set up a default layout based off an element in your account and will be applied to every newly added element. So if you have a measure in your account that has a layout you want to use for all newly added measures, you can set this as your default layout. So I'm going to move back into the Revenue measure that Kathryn was working with earlier, and I see the layout here and I know I want the same layout applied to any newly added measure. So in order to set up this default layout, under System Settings, I can go into Admin Options, click into Report Options, then move into the Default Layouts tab.

Okay, and here we can see that for each type of element, your default layout is going to be separate. Exactly.

So here I can click into Measure and type in Revenue and I'll see the revenue measures in my account populate in this drop down and I'll go ahead and click on the Corporate Scorecard, since that's the revenue measure I want to use as my default layout. So now I can save and I can see when I go into Manage Measures, if I was to add a new measure called Employee Turnover and Save, when I click into this, this will mimic the layout that we saw on the Revenue measure. It's missing one chart, but if we were to add a second chart to our employee turnover, it would look exactly the same as the revenue measure. So along with setting a default layout, we can also set default charts. This will set the same chart type for every newly added measure in your account. In order to set up a default chart, we're again going to click into Admin Options, but this time we're going to click into Chart Options. Here you can see we have the default chart type dropdown. This dropdown will populate with all the standard clearpoint charts, as well as any custom charts in your account. So you can even set up custom charts as a default chart type. But for this example, we're going to go ahead and choose the line chart. We want every newly added measure from here on out to be added with a line chart. So I can save that. And when I go back into Manage Measures, I can add another measure called Employee Salary. And when I click into my Charts tab here and edit the default chart, I can see that it's showing me that it is a line chart. So setting a default chart is a great way to save some time when a majority of the measures in your account will all use the same chart type.

Awesome. So those are some really helpful options to know about. And while we're talking about time savers, I do want to jump back to Master Measures and show you one of the major benefits of having measures linked to a template. So let's go back here to our example of the revenue measure. Just going to use history to jump back over to the Western Division, and let's say that after a year of tracking revenue this way, everyone's really happy about the consistency. But someone in leadership has decided that you really should be looking at year to date variance too, and not just the difference in your monthly revenue series. So normally you'd have to go into each individual revenue measure, add that year to date series, and then add a calculation to that new series. But now we can do this in just one place from our MasterMeasure template and have it apply to all of those linked measures. So let's go into Admin options.

Mastermeasures.

Click to edit our template and we'll head to the Measure Series tab. So just like adding a series to a regular measure, I'm going to click the add icon, give it a name, and then we'll head over to our calculation. So this is going to be the year to date revenue minus the year to date target. And you'll see just a slight difference here when you're working in the MasterMeasure template, which is that instead of choosing a specific scorecard and measure for your series to come from, this is going to be a Master Series token stemming from your Master Measure template. So first we'll choose that Master Series year to date revenue, and Then subtract the year to date target. When we click Save, we're going to see that that series has been added to our template and we'll click Save and go back to look at that linked measure. So here in our data table, we've got a brand new series that's already populating based on the Western division data. And if we go into another one of our linked measures, say in the Eastern division, we will also see that new calculated series ready for any data that we enter here.

Wow. So we've made changes to multiple measures at once with just that one change to our MasterMeasure template. But we know that not all changes to measures involve adding things. You might be wondering how to delete things from Mastermeasures too.

Yep, definitely. And there are actually two ways to delete things from your MasterMeasure template. So let's walk through a couple of scenarios where you might use those two options. So now that we've got year to date variance, we're focusing slightly more on those year to date numbers. Let's say we don't need our monthly variance series anymore and we want to get rid of it in all of those linked measures, so the departments know to concentrate on the year to date variance. Instead. I can go back into my MasterMeasure template over to measure series and just click to delete that variance series. Now, once I click Delete, clearpoint is actually going to pop up a second window with two options here. If we click Delete, we can fully remove the series from all linked measure data tables. Or if we click Unlink, we can remove the series from the MasterMeasure template, but leave it as an independent series series in each of those linked measures. So we do want to do the former. In this case, we'll just click delete and we'll see our variance series disappear.

But I do want to show you.

How that unlinked example works too. So heading over to our charts, we're focused on the year to date. We don't want to have this revenue gauge in any newly linked series anymore. So we'll click to delete the chart and again we're going to have our two options. But this time maybe we'll choose Unlink so that any divisions that are already set up with a revenue measure and are finding that gauge chart helpful would still have the option to refer to it if they want to. So click on Unlink.

And let's take.

A look at the changes to our linked measures since we made those adjustments. First off, in Our data table, we can no longer see our variance series here. It's been deleted. And our gauge chart is still here because we unlinked it rather than fully deleting it from the MasterMeasure template. But when I double click, I can edit it independently, just like any other chart. Now, there's one more scenario that we want to cover, and that is what if you want to adjust a single measure that's linked to a mastermeasure template without disrupting the template overall? And there are a couple of ways to go about that as well.

As we mentioned briefly before, you do have the option to disable components of the Master measure for an individual measure. What that means is that in the linked measure in particular, the disabled components won't show up.

Right? So let's go and use our new survey metric for an example. So since this data is new as of this year, the Survey Response Over Time chart isn't giving us much additional information. Maybe we want to use it later, but for now we just want to disable that chart. So we'll click to edit, go over to the Charts tab, and I'll just check the box next to disable. So that chart is going to disappear from our page. We're left with this year's view at our percent satisfaction responses. And as you can see here, disabling is probably the best option when your changes revolve around hiding parts of that MasterMeasure template from an individual linked measure.

But what if you've linked a measure to a mastermeasure template and then realize it needs to function completely differently? Are you stuck with all those Master series and charts?

Nope, not at all. So you can always unlink a measure entirely from its MasterMeasure template. And unlinking means that any further changes to the linked measure can be edited individually, won't impact the Master Measure template, and vice versa. So if we click to edit that measure and go back to our Edit tab in the same place where we first linked that master measure, we can now unlink it. And we're going to have those same options remove the charts and series entirely, or just unlink them for independent editing. So now we have those same charts and series available, but we could double click and make any tweaks to the calculations and evaluations that we want. And again, no further changes to that Master measure template are going to affect this measure now that it's unlinked.

Awesome. So we do want to leave you guys with a couple of last pointers. First, it's important to remember to document which master measures are made for what purpose internally at your organization. Since other users can add or edit measures to link them to the Master measure, it is important that they know the purpose for each MasterMeasure template in your account. In ClearPoint, you should give the MasterMeasure a name that makes it very clear what measures it should be linked to.

Users should be able to look at.

The Master measure and immediately tell the purpose of it within your clearpoint account.

Right. So our examples today, the Revenue Template and Citizen Satisfaction Survey template, have really clear names so that other users could go in and link the measures appropriately. Exactly.

It's crystal clear what measures those templates should be linked to. It also could be useful to provide internal documentation to your users that goes into details on exactly when to link to MasterMeasure templates and any edits that should be made to the measure after it's linked.

Definitely those are good pointers to keep in mind. So we're reaching the end of our time here today and we're sure you've got plenty of burning questions that we can answer. So here's one that's come in. What users have the option to link and unlink a measure from a mastermeasure template? Tricia, do you want to take that one? Yeah.

So, great question. As you guys saw today, you're able to link and unlink from the edit window. So any user with an editor or above permission is able to link and unlink measures to the MasterMeasure template.

Exactly. So that's why communication is key, because your editors, your scorecard admins and your administrators have that option to link your templates to individual measures, even though the templates themselves are restricted to administrators. So another good question here. Can you re enable series and charts once they've been disabled? Yep, that's definitely the case. So if we click back on our revenue measure and click to edit our charts here, once again, disabling that chart is just going to remove it from the page. And if I wanted to go and re enable that chart, all I have to do is uncheck that box and it will pop right back up. So that leads well into another question, which is what happens to your chart and calculations that come from the Master Measure if you disable a master series? So let's use our survey metric again. Here is an example. If we scroll down to the data table, maybe for whatever reason, you don't have a target for this particular revenue measure yet, and you want to disable your target series so if we just disable that one target series, we know that it's contributing to our year to date target and consequently to that year to date variance series. And we can see here that those calculations are no longer going to populate because that original target series has been disabled. So in this case, we probably would also be disabling those other two series if we don't have a target in place. We can also see that there's still a place for that year to date target on our chart because since it's pulling from a master measure template, those pieces of the template are still going to remain consistent even though parts have been disabled. So basically, when you do disable parts of your measures, your linked measures, you just want to make sure that you're considering the use case and maybe setting up additional charts and series for that particular measure based on the way that you need to use it and adjust it. So that's all we have time for today. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the I Didn't Know clearpoint could do that webinar series. We hope to see you next time. And happy reporting.