FREE ARTICLES

Over the years, I have been writing articles about various aspects of performance measures and KPIs, and rather than keep them all to myself, here they are for you to get some use and benefit from them too, to improve your organisational performance.

Go crazy!

Editors and publishers: You may reproduce or include any of these articles in your own electronic or printed publications, provided you use the entire article without modification and include the “about the author” box. Contact me if you'd like a Word version.

ARTICLE: Ten biggest mistakes in managing organisational performance

Ah, performance measurement. It’s one of the pillars of organisational success and one of the perils of organisational management. We all know how challenging it can be to get right, but often we’re not really sure why. Here are the 10 biggest mistakes most people don’t even know they’re making when trying to manage organisational performance.

ARTICLE: Are you killing the buy-in?

Buy-in is that state when people are committed to something, when they are convinced of its worth for them and no longer have objections or fears that get in their way of adopting it. It’s when they feel a sense of ownership about it. Most of us want our people to feel this way about performance measurement, but we don't realise that we might actually be getting in the way of buy-in naturally occuring! Read this article for tips on how to engage staff in performance measurement.

ARTICLE: Should you measure individual people's performance?

Performance Appraisal, Individual Performance Review, Personal Performance Development Plan. There are numerous names for this artifact of the post-1990’s organisation, but they are names for basically the same concept: the measurement, review, evaluation and management of the performance of an employee. And it is one of the most contentious management processes of them all! Read some thoughts about two schools of thought about measuring people.

ARTICLE: Are you underestimating the performance measurement effort?

If you want a collection of useful and useable performance measures that lead to improvement of performance, then certain things must occur. Do you know what these activities are? Do you know who the departments and people are that contribute to these activities? Do you have a good idea about the kinds of resources that are needed to properly perform these activities? Do you appreciate how much time and effort is involved in properly performing these activities? Read this article to scope the activities in the performance measurement process.

ARTICLE: Are you measuring something meaningful?

If people don’t share a single, sharply focused, easily imaginable vision of a result they want to create, any effort to measure that result will waste time. And if you do successfully get some measures established, it’s likely they just won’t stimulate the excitement and motivation needed to make the result happen. Read this article and get tips for making your results easier to measure.

ARTICLE: Are you cascading your strategy, or fragmenting it?

The typical approach executive teams use to cascade, or roll out, their strategic direction is to produce a clear set of goals, objectives, critical success factors or a scorecard and then get each departmental or functional manager to take this on board and customize it for their part of the organisation. The trouble then begins… Read this article to get tips for what cascading strategy actually means.

ARTICLE: You didn't use brainstorming to select your measures, did you?

When Alex Osborn invented the creativity technique called brainstorming, I wonder if he had any idea just how extensively business would apply it. Almost every meeting employs some kind of brainstorming event, but there’s one meeting that really should leave it off the agenda: the performance measure selection meeting. Read this article and get tips for how to make your measures more meaningful.

ARTICLE: So you don't trust your data...

The management team sit around the monthly performance report, debating. But they’re not debating the interpretation of the trends or signals in the data. They’re not debating the causes that sit beneath those trends or signals. And they’re not debating the pros and cons of various performance improvement ideas. No, they’re debating whether or not the data has enough integrity to even consider using it. Not again!

ARTICLE: A simple way to measure customer satisfaction

Most people in business know they need feedback from customers in order to make service delivery and product design more in line with customer needs and expectations. But too often, the process of measuring customer satisfaction and perception is more complex and convoluted than it needs to be. Here is a simple approach that gives you punchy customer feedback, without overloading the customer with a thousand and one questions.

ARTICLE: 8 ways to make your survey useless

Surveys are one of the most popular methods for collecting data about people's attitudes and beliefs, such as customer perception of value, corporate image and employee satisfaction. And probably because of this popularity, many surveys lack the validity they require to provide useful and usable information. A survey is not a questionnaire plus an envelope plus a stamp. Make sure you're not making these mistakes in your surveys.

ARTICLE: The business questions your performance measures should answer

The report design working group sat around the table, sifting through the draft strategic performance report to suggest how to make it more useful. Measure by measure they chatted and suggested and critiqued and debated: “this one would look better if it was a bar chart”, “yeah, I like the three-dimensional bar charts”, “we should add another line to this chart because it would be interesting to show”, “it’s pretty easy to get Excel to turn this one into a stacked bar chart, that way we could get more information onto it”. Then someone asked: “hang on, what questions are we trying to answer with these measures anyway?”, and there was dead silence.

ARTICLE: Do your performance reports "stack up"?

It’s an emotional thing, performance reporting. Executives give up the precious little time they have for their families to instead paw through piles of strategic reports often more than an inch thick (or they leave the pile of reports on their desk and make decisions from their guts instead). Managers earnestly trawl through operational reports (particularly looking for the measures that give their performance contracts teeth) to check if anything needs a bit of positive light thrown on it. Supervisors and teams cynically scoff about the volumes of time and effort they waste reporting tables of statistics that track their daily activities to audiences they never see or hear from. What makes performance reporting such an ordeal?

ARTICLE: Are you reacting to trends that aren't really there?

We all love a chart or graphs that tells us how things are trending. And while there are lots of ways explore trends (or changes over time) in performance results, one of the most commonly used is the moving or rolling average. Are you using these? If so, you might want to find out why your interpretation could be misleading you more than they are helping you…

ARTICLE: Traffic lighting: are you getting the right signals?

Many decision support tools sport the concept of traffic lighting, the visual flagging of performance measures in terms of whether they are going well, going badly or looking a bit ordinary. And doesn’t that make decision making a whole lot easier! You don’t have to analyse and interpret every single measure to determine if you need to respond to it or not, because the coloured traffic lights do the job for you. Or do they…?

ARTICLE: Are you aiming too high?

What’s your target achieving track record? Do you reach the majority of your targets within their set timeframes, or do you find yourself throwing up all kinds of rationalizations and reasons as to why the majority of your targets were not met? It might be because your target setting process is a little too much about numbers and not nearly enough about emotion, about how people feel about the various aspects of target setting, pursuing and achieving.

ARTICLE: Are your decisions based on fact?

How do you know if your decision process is well-informed or ill-informed? And even if you could detect the clues of an ill-informed decision process, would you know what to do about it? Here are some ideas for how to get more rigour into your decision process by sliding a little further away from fantasy and a little further toward fact.

ARTICLE: Do you listen to your performance measures?

A management team distributes themselves around the board room table, the ritual of the monthly performance management meeting begins. Before too long, the first performance measure in the monthly report is under their scrutiny. It seems that supply costs have increased and now the procurement manager is under scrutiny. He deftly deflects the result with the explanation that a major supplier upped their prices. On to the next measure, and it shows that unfinished work is climbing. The operational manager takes his turn in the cover-your-butt game… How should we be using our measures?

Want more?

How could this list of articles not exhaust your questions?! ;-)

Seriously, if you'd like more information about designing meaningful performance measures, contact me.

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