Winning the game of operational metrics

Chris Conway
Chief Architect, Quantiv

It’s that time of year when the UK goes sports mad.

The world’s best tennis players recently descended on SW19 for the 2026 Wimbledon Championships.

And another activity that’s synonymous with summer is, of course, cricket, with spectators being spoilt for choice with Test Matches, T20s and ‘Hundreds’.

Even rugby’s Super League moved from winter to summer (although there’s talk of it switching back).

Plus, you’ve got the FIFA World Cup adding to the summer fixture list, with football fans staying up late to catch the action from across the pond.

Working out the origins

All this physical activity got me thinking about the origins of sports and how they develop in a similar way to operational metrics.

With athletics, for example, the connections to ‘real life’ are usually fairly obvious because it’s easy to see where running, jumping, throwing, etc. came from.

But with games where you play against opponents it’s often harder to work out how they began, and especially how the formats and rules were chosen.

Cricket is particularly mysterious. The length of the pitch is indeed an old English surveyors’ measurement (a chain = 22 yards), and it does feel as if there’s a connection to how far a ball can be thrown. But how did the choreography of balls, overs, innings come to be settled on, let alone the specific laws governing how a match progresses?

Realistically, the rules of games probably weren’t decided in a single session. It was probably a more trial-and-error process. Games almost certainly started as variations on more practical activities, like running in a particular direction, stopping and then hitting something. And practising those would seem natural.

Getting the right results

At some point, someone must have noticed certain movements or actions achieved better results, and so those naturally became the focal points of practices. Eventually, after many repeated activities, those movements became more formalised and, when combined in sequences, led to games with rules.

But observing those movements and actions, and deciding which were the preferred outcomes, required almost an early form of business analysis. Initially, noticing a particular event or its result could just be luck. But with experience, knowing how and when to look, and how to evaluate what happened, became more of a pattern.

And I think it’s from those patterns the games emerged.

The game of operational metrics

Organisational operations can develop in a similar way. Initially, your organisation might do just what’s needed to get by. There might be no overall plan or set of laws to govern what’s desired or even what’s allowed, but the business still runs.

Later, just repeating those initial decisions might be enough to allow everything to continue.

But, as the operations become established, your organisation will want to run better, be more efficient and improve its results. In the same way the rules of a game become clearer as the game is played, so the critical elements of organisational operations become more apparent as more activities are performed.

However, judging which operations are critical and which are simply nice to have is the key to success. For games, it doesn’t matter if it takes time to sort the exciting and entertaining from the pedantic and pointless. But for your organisation, taking too long to adapt and improve could cost you extra money or even see you overtaken by a nimbler competitor.

Why ‘good information’ is vital for success

Getting the results you want is more likely if you have access to ‘good information’. This means understanding which activities are used frequently, which are used occasionally but used to handle exceptions, and which are simply variations on a theme.

The best time to gather that information is when things happen. A ball in flight might be thrilling to watch but it’s only when it comes to rest inside a line, hits a wicket or lands in a goal that it becomes significant and determines what happens next. Capturing information about those points in your organisation is as important as it is in a game, meaning it’s possible to optimise operational processes in the same way as sporting performance.

This is the approach we use in our NumberWorks method and NumberCloud platform. We call it ‘intersection-oriented design’. But if you’re a sports enthusiast (even if only at this time of year), you could think of it as a ‘Hawk-Eye’ or ‘Snicko’ for organisational operations.

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