How do I design measures that are meaningful and results-oriented?

If you're serious about performance measures and KPIs as valuable tools to manage your organisation's or business' performance, but you don't have a rigourous process to develop those measures and KPIs, then there's a good chance your experiencing these things:

• measures not being used because no-one sees them as relevant
• no clear links between your measures and your strategy
• no idea how to measure your goals, especially those intangible, qualitative goals

If this sounds like your experience, then the following resources may be of some assistance:

WEBCAST: How To Measure The Seemingly Immeasurable Performance Results

In this free webcast, hosted and archived by bettermanagement.com, and delivered by Stacey Barr, you will learn:

• the critical step that most people leave out of the performance measure selection process, which so often leads to wasting time on the wrong measures, or not measuring what should and can be measured
• a few illustrative examples of how the seemingly immeasurable becomes measurable
• practical tips to immediately make your strategy more measurable

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 aren't brainstorming your measures, are 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.

RESOURCE: How to Design Meaningful Performance Measures (not free)

This is one of my PuMP How-to Kits, and it's about measure design. It's not about brainstorming or benchmarking or some vague approach to finding measures. It will challenge your thinking at the same time as walking you through 5 powerful steps to ensure you create the most meaningful measures for your goals. Read more or buy this tool.

ARTICLE: Everything is Measurable

This is a paper written by Douglas Hubbard for the CIO Enterprise Magazine. Even though it is discussing measurement of IT value, it has a great tool called The Clarification Chain which will really challenge beliefs about how much actually can be measured!

AUDIO: Interview with author of Everything is Measurable

I interviewed Doug Hubbard in one of my free teleseminars in 2007, about how to measure anything (yes, anything!) which is the topic of his new book. You can register for free to listen and download the transcript here.

BLOG: Mission Measurement

With an emphasis on measuring corporate social responsibility, the Mission Measurement site has a blog with some great articles about measuring that are informative and well written.

ARTICLE: Count On It.

One of the thinking processes I believe is ESSENTIAL to developing good performance measures is to understand just how powerfully measuring something can channel energy toward making it happen. It's to do with the way our brains focus attention (the Reticular Activating System is the part of the brain that focuses us). Read more in this interesting article at www.businessknowhow.com.

WEBSITE: IDeA Knowledge

If you want your strategy to be measurable, it helps to no end that your strategy is written in plain English! It has to avoid words that are fluffy, vague, jargon or 'management speak' - like efficient, effective, best practice, optimise, enhance and improve. Take a look at these resources for how to use plain English in your business documents.

AUDIO: Don Watson Radio Interview

The power of language when you design performance measures cannot be stressed enough. If you don't describe the outcomes you want to create in sensory rich, motivating language, you will likely measure the wrong things. Listen to what Don Watson, author of "Death Sentence" has to say about the impact language has on how we manage, in this 612 ABC Brisbane radio interview.

TIP: Sensory Rich Language

One of the bits of advice I give to my clients when it comes to measuring things is to first write down what you want to measure, using sensory rich language. Sensory rich language makes our typically vague and inert goals or objectives far more concrete and tangible and detectable. And you can't measure something unless it is detectable! (I said deTectable, not deLectable.)

Want more?

If you'd like more information about designing meaningful measures, contact me.

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