Performance measurement is a process, not an event. It’s a series of specific activities for creating, implementing and using performance measures, and it’s not just a brainstorming session on the tail-end of your business planning workshop. If you don’t take each step in the process deliberately, there’s little wonder your performance measures or KPIs just aren’t measuring up.

What most people are really searching for is the detailed, nitty-gritty, exactly-how-do-you-do-it steps of deciding what to measure, choosing the most appropriate measures, designing new measures from scratch, implementing measures, reporting measures in a useful and usable way, and integrating measures seamlessly into decision making.

And because that’s what I was searching for back in the 1990s, in my role as Measurement Consultant at Queensland Rail, is why PuMP® was born. PuMP® is all about the performance measurement process (that’s where the ‘PMP’ comes from – the ‘u’ comes from a client who wanted to give the Performance Measurement Process a cute nickname instead of a boring acronym). PuMP® is a methodology that gives you the steps to develop performance measures. And here are those seven steps:

1. SELECT: choose what’s worth measuring

Selecting what to measure starts not with the question ‘what should we measure?’ but with first being clear about the results that matter most to you and your business. If you don’t know the performance results you’re trying to achieve, then you’ll probably too many measures that no-one finds useful, or no measures at all. And the way that most business strategy is written, it’s very hard to work out what the important results are, because of the vague language and broad terminology (for example: “We will enhance the quality, reliability, efficiency and effectiveness of our service delivery processes”).

This first step in PuMP has you doing two things specifically: we first use the PuMP Results Mapping technique to decide what results are worth measuring, and then we use the PuMP Measure Design technique to create or select the measures that are the strongest and most feasible evidence of those results. No guessing, no brainstorming.

2. COLLECT: gather data which has integrity

The process of collecting data for performance measures is critical to its integrity and can be very resource intensive. The more you can limit your data collection to what is useful, not just interesting, the better off you’ll be. So it pays (literally) to be super-specific about the data you really need for your performance measures, and not just go create a survey or form to collect a bunch of data that seems potentially useful.

There are two PuMP techniques that help maximise the benefits from your data collection efforts: the PuMP Measure Definition technique to be very precise about exactly what data each measure will need, and the PuMP Data Collection Process technique to design the steps to get the data you need without wasted time or effort.

3. STORE: manage the data so it’s quick and easy to access

Where and how you store your data directly determines what data you can access, when and how quickly you can access it, how easy or difficult it is to access and how much cross-functional use you can get out it. Most of the skill for managing performance data lies in your organiation’s IT department, but your PuMP Measure Definitions will go a very long way toward helping the IT department get you access to the data you need, with the least effort.

4. ANALYSE: turn the data into information

Analysis is the process of turning raw data into information. To make sure your performance measures are the most appropriate information you need to be almost pedantic about the analysis method you choose to answer those measures’ driving questions.

Again, the PuMP Measure Definition technique helps you make it very clear what the right analysis method is for each of your performance measures, and as such, these Measure Defintions become the blueprint or specification for exactly how each performance measure will be brought to life. No more pie charts or percentages when the real driving questions actually need a time series analysis!

5. PRESENT: effectively communicate the information

In communicating performance information, you are influencing which messages the audience focuses on. It’s vital to take care to present performance measures in ways that provide simple, relevant, trustworthy and visual answers to their priority questions. Too many people just throw performance reports or dashboards together with graphs designed to entertain rather than inform. And usually then end up misinforming!

The PuMP Reporting Measures technique helps you to design a structure, content, layout and visual design for your performance reports that syncs with decision-making and helps the real performance signals jump right off the page.

6. INTERPRET: translate the information into implication

Interpreting your performance measures means translating messages highlighted by performance information into conclusions about what’s really going on. To turn information into implication, you must discern which messages are real messages (and not all of them are!). If you’re in the habit of comparing this month to last month, or this month to a target, you’re probably drawing the wrong conclusions from your measures!

It’s the patterns, not the points, that we need to focus on with performance measures. And the PuMP Using Measures technique shows you which patterns to look for, what they mean, and how to respond to them so you don’t react to difference that aren’t real, and so you don’t miss the differences that are real.

7. APPLY: decide how implication will become action

When you have worked out what is really going on with your organisation’s performance, you are ready to make some decisions about what to improve, how much to improve it by and how to do that improving. And you want to steer clear of the typical traps people fall into when they are deciding how to respond to their performance measures.

The PuMP Using Measures technique helps you steer clear of traps like jumping to quick fixes that will fail, blaming results on things outside your control, and focusing too much on people rather than process improvement.

TAKING ACTION:
Where is your performance measurement process strong, and where is it weak? Flowchart the steps you take to select, collect, store, analyse, present, interpret and apply performance measures to find where you could get the biggest improvement in your measures for the least effort. Try this complimentary PuMP Diagnostic Discussion Tool to trigger a very insightful discussion with your colleagues.

In his book, “10-Minute Toughess”, sports psychologist Jason Selk says:

“…people spend too much time aiming at the bull’s-eye and not enough time shooting at it. Rather than placing so much emphasis on getting ready and aiming, go ahead and take a shot. Taking the shot gets you started and also lets you gauge how far off the mark you are. Make adjustments, but keep shooting until you get closer and closer, and eventually you will hit the bull’s-eye.”

In business performance management, this means we need to get comfortable with failing before we’ll truly succeed. We need to stare our weaknesses and problems and obstacles straight in the eye and attack them with solutions until they yield to our intentions for high performance. But this means changing a mindset that’s endemic, menacing and unconsciously ingrained in management culture: making excuses.

Excuses and reasons are not the same thing, even though they may refer to the same thing. A management team in the education sector with whom I consulted many years ago had set a goal to grow revenue over a 12 month period, but at no point during those 12 months did we see any kind of improvement at all. They were noticing that other education institutes like them were experiencing revenue falls as well. They saw in their business environment a decline in the numbers of people taking courses.

This management team had two choices. The first choice was the one they made, and it was to use the current business environment as the excuse for not achieving their revenue target, and giving up on it. The second choice was to see that the immediate reason for their revenue problem was in the business environment, and to ask “What can we do to compensate or respond to what’s going on in the business environment, to keep striving for our revenue goal?” The first choice is the easy one, and the second choice is the better one.

Excuses effectively release us from accountability when performance falls short of our goal. They are cop-outs, ‘get out of jail free’ cards. But if we take our goals seriously, surely we’re not going to give up pursuing them at the first sign of trouble, are we? This accountability-releasing excuse-focus is very often a cultural problem, deep in the psyche of the organisation’s people and the acceptable norms of performance management. I’m not sure if it’s fear or complacency or feeling stuck or something else. I do know that people who have this problem-focused attitude achieve very little, either personally or professionally and people who have the opposite of this attitude achieve far and away more.

The opposite of this excuse-focused attitude is not actually an accountability-focused attitude. If we dwell too much on the word ‘accountability’ we just deepen the sense of dread that drives people to find excuses in the first place. The opposite of this excuse-focused attitude is a solution-focused attitude. And as Jason Selk says in his book, it’s actually a relentless solution-focus that’s needed for high performance. We don’t measure performance for the fun of it; we measure performance to dramatically improve performance, to achieve lofty goals and exciting targets that mean the world’s a better place on account of our endeavour. Even though Jason Selk is a sports psychologist, his words are wise for those of us in business too. We need some toughness to break through to high performance, and a relentless solution-focus is the new cultural norm we must practice.

No excuses. Either perform, or don’t.

TAKING ACTION:
Do your bit to help shift the culture away from excuses and towards a relentless solution focus. Whenever you hear someone make an excuse for underperformance of any kind, practice asking questions that help them think about how they could find a solution for that obstacle, or make some amount of progress despite it.

You depend on the quality of data and information to provide a stable foundation for your decision making. Decision making often involves responding to something, so you need your data to validly describe what you are responding to so that you choose the right responses.

Whether your data is quantitative (based on numbers) or qualitative (based on perceptions), it’s integrity depends on 5 widely recognised qualities.

Relevant

Make sure the data you have selected is directly appropriate to the purpose of the performance measure you selected it for. Be careful of data that seems interesting: it doesn’t mean it is relevant. Trying to gather more data than you really need, especially in surveys, can negatively impact on the other dimensions of data integrity (below).

–> Be ruthless and collect only the data you have a use for in monitoring and diagnosing performance.

Reliable

Collect enough data and collect it carefully to ensure that it is precise enough (especially if it is an estimate based on a sample) and continues to be precise enough as you collect it over time. Would you rely on one day’s rainfall to draw conclusions about annual rainfall? What about five days’ rainfall? How many days rainfall would you need to get a precise enough estimate of annual rainfall? And what would this depend on?

–> Design your sample sizes to give the reliability you need. Don’t guess.

Representative

It is important that the data you collect are observable events or characteristics that describe the full scope of what your performance measure is supposed to be measuring. This means that it is unbiased, or accurate enough. The last thing you need is for your data to tell you only what the “squeaky wheels” have to say, drowning out the valid and important and balancing views of the “well oiled wheels”. Squeaky wheels, volunteer surveys and easiest-ones-to-measure are examples of data sources unlikely to give you accurate enough data.

–> Define your population carefully, and select random samples to avoid bias.

Readable

Unless the data you collect is clearly defined, legibly presented, easy to organise for analysis, makes sense to its users and can be easily interpreted and understood by them, it won’t matter how relevant, representative or reliable it is. It just won’t be usable. The numbers need to be in a format you can use.

–> Design your data collection forms and questionnaires carefully to give you the data in the format your analysis needs.

Realistic

Trade off the degree to which your data is relevant, representative, reliable and readable with the level of resources you will need to invest to make it so. Make sure the value you get from using your data is greater than the effort you invested in getting it. Beware of the temptation to invest in sophisticated automatic data capture systems (such as bar-coding and voice recognition software) – if you haven’t got a simple manual system working well first, then these systems are likely to cost you much, much more than the savings they appear to promise.

–> Pilot test your data collection processes to be sure they will deliver cost-effective data.

TAKING ACTION:
If you have a performance measure or KPI that triggers more debate about data quality than it does about performance levels, then use the 5 Rs of data integrity to work out where the data collection process can be improved.

Your performance measures are there to give you advice about what is going on in your business so you can choose the most appropriate way to manage its performance. This means that you will choose different types of actions depending on what kind of advice your measure is giving you, or, what kind of signal it’s giving off.

There are seven important performance signals you’ll want to look for, and be prepared to respond to when you see them:

Signal 1: Performance is unpredictable or chaotic

When performance is unpredictable you’ll see it fluctuating wildly with very large variability from week to week or month to month. This chaotic behaviour is symptomatic of a business process that is out of control because it lacks standardisation in the process steps or the inputs used. Don’t try to improve performance. You need to get it under control first.

Signal 2: Performance is worsening

Depending on your performance measure, worsening performance might be evidenced by an upward trend or shift, as in the case of Expenditure or Rework Hours, or by a downward trend or shift, as in the case of Customer Satisfaction or Profit. If you can pinpoint when the worsening in performance began, you have a better chance of finding out why, and taking successful action to turn the trend around.

Signal 3: Performance is stable and not changing

Performance values will always vary to some extent, and variation does not necessarily mean change. If your performance measure values are varying consistently within the same band or range, and you don’t see any values breaking away from this consistent but random pattern over time, the measure is signalling that nothing is changing. Sometimes that’s good, but it’s not good if you expect to see improvement.

Signal 4: Performance is improving, but not fast enough to reach the target

All improvement in performance is good, when it’s planned, but sometimes improvement is not big enough or fast enough to reach the planned targets. If the targets still matter, and your measure is signalling that the improvement rate won’t be fast enough to reach the target in time, you need to intervene.

Signal 5: Performance is improving at a rate fast enough that the target will likely be met

This is a good signal! That your measure is indeed tracking confidently toward its target level of performance is a great sign that your strategies and improvement projects aimed at achieving the target are working. But such signals are not a sure sign, because just as extraneous factors can cause a deterioration performance beyond your control, they can also cause an improvement in performance beyond your control too (just take the economy as an example in both cases). Check before you celebrate.

Signal 6: Performance has reached target

The best signal to get from your performance measures is that the target has been achieved. As with the signal of performance tracking confidently toward its target, this is a great sign that your strategies and improvement projects have worked. But again, such signals are not a sure sign, because of those extraneous factors outside your control. Check before you celebrate.

Signal 7: Performance has exceeded the target

Contrary to what you may think, exceeding a target is not better than meeting a target. It is a potential waste of resources and time that could have been better spent fixing more important performance shortfalls.

The best way to be sure you can see these signals in your KPIs and performance measures is to present them in a time series, using a line chart, with at least 20 historic values, and add your target as a point above the future date it should be achieved. Then you’ll have a clear view of what’s really happening with performance, and you won’t make those rash and wasteful decisions from drawing conclusions based on “this month to last month” comparisons.

TAKING ACTION:
Are your KPIs and performance measures displaying graphically in a way that can highlight these 7 important performance signals? If not, display your measures in a time series line chart, with at least 20 historic values, and add your target as a point above the future date it should be achieved. What insights does this give you about actual performance?

One of the worst immeasurability problems with strategy is the excessive use of ‘weasely’ language. And you’ll know what I mean if your strategy is full of words like efficiency, productivity, sustainability, or even performance outcomes.

Wikipedia explains what weasel words are:

The expression weasel word derives from the egg-eating habits of weasels… An egg that a weasel has sucked will look intact to the casual observer, while actually being empty. Thus, words or claims that turn out to be empty upon analysis are known as “weasel words”. The expression first appeared in Stewart Chaplin’s short story ‘Stained Glass Political Platform’ (published in 1900 in The Century Magazine,… in which they were referred to as “words that suck the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks the egg and leaves the shell.” Theodore Roosevelt attributed the term to Dave Sewall, claiming that Sewall used the term in a private conversation in 1879…

In the political sphere, this type of language is used to “spin” or alter the public’s perception of an issue. In 1916, Theodore Roosevelt argued that “one of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use … ‘weasel words’; when one ‘weasel word’ is used … after another there is nothing left.”

My first exposure to the term was from Don Watson, an Australian political speech writer and author of many books but two in particular to do with weasel words, “Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language” and “Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words”. Irrespective of the source of the term “weasel words”, its impact is profound in our struggles to find meaningful performance measures to align to our strategy and convince us of its execution and achievement.

Look at any strategic plan, perhaps even your own, and the chances are astronomically high that you’ll see aplenty words like effective, efficient, productive, responsive, sustainable, engaged, quality, flexible, adaptable, well-being, reliable, key, capability, leverage, robust, accountable. That’s just scratching the surface of the glut of empty and inert words that sound important and fail to say to anything at all, or at least speak of anything that can be verified in the real world, or measured.

Here are some more examples of strategies rendered meaningless with weasel words:

• “Provide efficient, unique, unbiased and responsive, high quality support” which is from a military organisation.
• “Strengthen student engagement and learning outcomes by enhancing student support and intervention services”, from a government education department.
• “[We] will be a leader in articulating and characterizing the dynamic system of scholarly communication”, from a library association.

Where you have used weasel words, you must define specifically what you mean by them or accept the fact that you’ll forever struggle to find meaningful ways to measure them. And your strategy will remain open for interpretation and any interpretation will do – this is NOT a recipe for high performance.

TAKING ACTION:
Grab a highlighter pen and your strategic or operational or business plan, and highlight all the weasel words – the words that really say nothing at all about performance results. How can you express what those words are really trying to say, in words that make it easier to understand and measure the results they imply?

Just as the principle of leverage can apply to many different situations and contexts, from bicycles to business process reengineering, the lessons I’m learning from my running coach, Rina, and other world-class athletes also seem to apply to my work as a Performance Measurement Practitioner. The pursuit of excellence in anything, it seems, is based on a core set of principles.

I don’t profess to know what they all are, but through running training with my coach, I’ve learned a few that mean a lot to me. I hope they can help you too, in your endeavours to lead your organisation to excel through measuring and achieving what matters.

Principle 1: Run the kilometre you’re running right now, not the kilometres you’re yet to run.

A weekly training session in my running program is to do a series of 1km intervals, as fast as I can. I started out having to do 5 of them, on an interval of 6 minutes and 30 seconds. If I finished the kilometre in 4 minutes 30 seconds, then I had 2 minutes to recover before starting the next one.

When you’re running flat out for a kilometre, it absolutely and positively DOES NOT help to think about how many you have left to do. What happens is that in your head you’re running the kilometre your legs are running right now in addition to each of the other kilometres you have left. It feels many times harder and sometimes even impossible. That’s why my coach Rina says, ‘Just run the kilometre you’re running right now and focus on nothing else.’

Overwhelm and premature defeat in establishing a powerful performance measurement system in an organisation is caused by a similar problem: you’re thinking about how much there is yet to do, or how much different things should be to how they are now. To pursue excellence, you’re better off focusing just a few smaller areas first – perhaps one team or one strategic goal or one business process at a time. Then you’ll keep building on those smaller successes, to bigger and faster successes.

Principle 2: Be bold and push yourself: you’ll be surprised how far outside your comfort zone you can go and you’ll still be okay.

My coach Rina calls those 1km interval sessions the ‘vomit sessions’ because the idea is to push yourself to the point of almost throwing up, where you’ve hit your lactic threshold. Rina says that most people don’t get faster because they’re scared to push themselves hard enough. But because our bodies, like any adaptive system, have the default set at degenerate, we have to keep giving it challenges, pushing its boundaries, to shake the default and ask it to achieve new levels of performance.

I’ve nearly thrown up several times during these 1km interval sessions, but it was more than worth it to now say that my average times have come down by 20 seconds over 3 months. But I had to trust that I’d be okay if I pushed myself where I’d never gone before, and that my body would handle it just fine.

If we want organisational or business performance to shift to new levels, we have to do the same. We’ve got to push the boundaries, push the threshold of what feels possible, be bold enough to go into uncomfortable territory. Nothing will truly change otherwise. Usually, for performance measurement, this means pushing the social boundaries, pushing the misbeliefs and limiting attitudes people have about measuring.

Principle 3: When your goal is backed by an action plan, it’s all downhill (so to speak).

If you’ve ever done any kind of sport or exercise, you’ll remember times when you woke up in the morning and thought ‘Good grief, I just can’t do it today,’ and rolled over and went back to sleep. I used to do it too! The difference now is that I have a goal, to run 10km in 45 minutes this year, and it’s backed by the training program Rina writes for me each month. I don’t have to think about it, I just have to do it. (And it doesn’t hurt that I want Rina to keep taking me seriously!)

When you know exactly what to do, when to do it and why you’re doing it, it’s so much easier to get it done. So even though I know some of my running sessions will be very hard and have me doing uphill surges, it still feels downhill because I don’t have to think about how far I’ll run or where I’ll run or how hard I’ll work. I just follow the plan.

Too many organisations take an ad hoc approach to performance measurement, not realising that to get it right, and get it right quickly, there is a deliberate process to follow to select the best measures, implement those measures and make it easy to use those measures to improve performance. To pursue excellence in performance measurement, you need a deliberate action plan to design and execute your measurement process, so each week you know what to focus on, what to aim for, and why.

Principle 4: Be your goal, be the success you aim for, not just while you’re running but all the time.

Rina moves fast every time I see her, not just when she’s running. She seems to throw herself into whatever she’s doing and I love being around her energy. Have you noticed that about other high achievers? World champion ultra distance and mountain runner Lizzy Hawker says “Looking back… I was ‘training’ in the raw each and every day of my life. Endurance for me is a way of life rather than a sport.”

For me, I can now see that to achieve my running goals, I need to act right now like the person who achieves lots of goals, the person who is always getting better at something, who loves pursuing goals. It keeps me in a mindset of possibility, and strangely, a mindset of enjoying the journey even more than the destination.

My business coach, Robert Gerrish, said something like this once: “A leader, a REAL leader, is someone who leads ALL the time, is inspiring ALL the time, is empassioned ALL the time – not just turning it on for 60 minutes. It’s on ALL the time.” That’s how we need to be as performance measurement practitioners. We have to always be that person who loves pursuing excellence in performance. And soon, others just won’t be able to resist that infectious energy and spark.

Principle 5: Surround yourself with the best support team you can muster.

Luck did play some part in my being able to hire an Olympic athlete as my running coach – Rina lives in my town and is a personal trainer these days. But that shouldn’t discount the fact that hiring her was a smart move. I want the speed, I want the endurance, I want the fitness – more than I was going to ever achieve on my own. Rina knows what she’s doing – her achievements are testimony to that – so I confidently do what she tells me to do.

Trusting my coach takes a huge load off my mind in pursuing my running goals. I don’t have to research running training techniques, I don’t have to work out what’s right for me or what’s not right for me. I just focus on doing the best I can at what Rina tells me to do. And that makes the hard work heaps easier. And the same goes for the physiotherapist and masseur and I regularly visit – I trust the work they do on my tired and strained legs and feet.

You won’t be able to single-handedly lead excellence in performance measurement in your organisation. You’ll need a team too, of people who believe in your vision, who each bring an important capability to make that vision a reality. You might even need a performance measurement coach, who can guide you out of ruts and around potholes so you reach success much sooner.

All in all, pursuing excellence in anything – performance measurement especially – often requires a change in who we are being and how we are thinking, more profoundly than what we are doing.

TAKING ACTION:
Does one of these principles resonate with you today? Reflect on why it resonates with you, check if there’s an area in your pursuit of performance measurement excellence that feels a little flat, or is falling short. What’s the advice you’d give yourself to pop up out of the rut, or more nimbly avoid those upcoming potholes?

wrong ideas about KPIs and measurement?

Possibly at the root of all objections people have to measuring performance and having KPIs is their beliefs about why we do it. Before you can successfully overcome all the other typical objections people have – like not having the time, not knowing where to start, not seeing the need for it – you need to be sure first and foremost that people understand the real reasons why we measure performance.

Think about all the dysfunctional behaviours you’ve seen or heard people doing, in relationship to performance measures or KPIs: changing the way customer satisfaction is calculated to increase the percentage who were “satisfied”, leaving out excessively late or lost deliveries when recording on-time delivery data, arming themselves with every excuse under the sun about why revenue is under target.

It’s not because people are bad that they do these things. It’s because they have the wrong beliefs about performance measurement. They believe that KPIs or performance measures exist to judge them. They believe that performance measures are for reporting upward to management or external stakeholders. They believe that they have little to no control over the measures they are judged by.

These beliefs are held by frontline workers, middle managers, senior executives and even boards of directors.

So before you try and solve the problems of people not having the time to measure, not having the know-how to measure, not seeing the value in measuring, you first have to start different conversations about what performance measures are truly for.

Performance measures and KPIs are not to judge people, but to inform them. Performance measures and KPIs are not for reporting upward and outward, but for reporting within the team. Performance measures and KPIs are not for the results that people control, but for the results that they can influence.

Performance measures and KPIs are feedback to inform and empower and inspire people to do their best. That’s a message worth spreading.

TAKING ACTION:
Start new conversations about performance measurement in your organisation or company. Create your own “elevator speech” – a 60 second engaging and informative summary – for what performance measurement is really all about, in your own natural words. Challenge yourself to share it with at least 5 people each day, in natural conversation. Test and tune it until you get the response you want from them (which could be to ask you a question to get more information).

Performance Measurement Process breaking down?

It’s a great idea to diagnose where your own performance measurement process might be in most need of improvement, because if you want more meaningful performance measures and KPIs, you need to change the process that you use to produce them.

You know that Albert Einstein said: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Thusly, we can’t get better measures or KPIs by using the same kind of thinking we used when created those we currently have.

So when you understand how the fundamental performance measurement process works, you have a better model for how to start fixing your performance measurement process, and start producing more meaningful performance measures and KPIs.

Start by flowcharting, just simply, your existing process for performance measurement. Flag where your biggest problems are in your performance measurement process. Then examine each step in your process that needs fixing, and decide what different thinking is needed, what different approaches are needed, to remove the root causes of those problems. Yes, we’re talking standard process improvement here.

Let’s look each phase or stage of a typical performance measurement process:

STAGE 1: Selecting Your Performance Measures and KPIs

How do you select your performance measures? When do you review and choose your measures? Who selects them? How do you align them to goals or strategy or processes or functions?

There are two major root causes for why we end up with too many of the wrong kinds of KPIs and never enough of the right kind. The first root cause is the pursuit of measures without a clearly articulated business strategy that is results-oriented rather than action-oriented. The second root cause is the use of brainstorming or other feeble methods of choosing performance measures.

STAGE 2: Capturing the Data For Your Performance Measures and KPIs

How do you identify and capture the performance data your measures need? Who designs the data collection processes? Is data collected manually or is it automated? How do you decide when to stop collecting data? Where is performance data stored? How is data extracted from systems for analysis and reporting? Who does it?

Two big root causes mean that measures don’t get implemented, or why we end up with 12 versions of the same measure, or completely the wrong calculation or data being used. One is that we are too casual about defining our performance measures in enough detail, and the other is that we fail to involve the right people in the decision making about what gets measured and how.

STAGE 3: Analysing and Reporting Your Performance Measures and KPIs

How do you turn the data into your performance measures? Is this analysis automated or manual? Who does it? What questions drive the analysis? How often are measures reported? What kinds of reports are produced? Who produces them? Which parts of the reporting process are automated or standardised? How are the reports structured or designed? Which reports go to which audiences?

One big root cause continues to ensure that performance reports and dashboards distort the truth and encourage the wrong responses to our KPIs. It’s simply that people don’t understand how to visually display quantitative information to reveal true signals, instead defaulting to poor graphics like silly dials and gauges and pie charts.

STAGE 4: Interpreting and Using Your Performance Measures and KPIs

How are your performance measures interpreted and used? How are the signals in measures highlighted or flagged? What are the rules that are used to decide when performance has changed or needs attention? Where and when are performance measures used? What role do they take in decision making? How are actions or responses decided and executed? How are strategies and initiatives to improve performance tested?

A fundamental root cause that the majority of organisations don’t even know they have leads to consistently missing important signals until it’s too late and not reaching targets. It’s a failure to understand and appreciate statistical thinking and instead relying on very dangerous interpretation methods like ‘this month to last month’ and other two-point comparisons.

To get better KPIs, we need to change our thinking.

If your organisation is like most, you’re not going to find the answer to better KPIs and performance measures by looking within. You really need to open up to different approaches to performance measurement, to proven techniques that are designed to specifically solve those common problems by eliminating the root causes. Remember Einstein’s wisdom: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

TAKING ACTION:
Learn more detail on how to improve your performance measurement process in a free webcast recording you can listen to or download immediately, by registering for free at http://www.staceybarr.com/fixyourkpis.html

Performance Measurement Process breaking down?

There are many, many symptoms of a broken performance measurement process, and while I don’t particularly want to dwell too long on this topic, you might find it useful to have a quick reference list of most typical of these symptoms.

It can be useful for you to diagnose where your own performance measurement process might be in most need of attention, and can also provide a discussion point to get your colleagues and staff to start thinking differently about how to make measurement work.

Here’s my checklist of 36 most common symptoms of a performance measurement process breaking down:

1. lack of clear goals to measure against

2. the measures don’t align to strategic direction or team or individual goals or purpose

3. not knowing what to measure

4. struggling to measure seemingly immeasurable goals

5. not seeing the need to measure, or to have different measures

6. have too many measures or KPIs

7. a focus on financial measures and ignoring non-financial measures

8. manual and time-consuming data collection

9. the performance data that is collected is inconsistent, incomplete and inaccurate

10. performance data is not gathered in a timely enough manner to make decisions

11. not enough investment in data collection

12. too much time gathering data and not enough time to analyse it

13. difficulty in getting performance data out of data systems

14. disparate data sources don’t communicate with each other

15. not enough investment in data organisation or management

16. people do not capture the data the organisation needs them to

17. not finding meaningful formulas for measures values and data analysis

18. different groups measuring the same things different ways

19. lack of guidelines about how to report the measures and how often

20. reports are time consuming to produce

21. reports are cluttered and hard to use and navigate

22. targets are based on opinions

23. jumping to conclusions based on a month to month difference

24. misusing trend information

25. not knowing what actions to take in response to measures

26. people cannot say how they would act differently if the measure showed a change

27. people fear the measures showing poor performance

28. not clear who should take action based on the performance results

29. not using the data the organisation does have to improve processes and quality

30. no time for discussion about why the measures are important and what people can do to influence and improve the measures

31. people can not influence the performance results their measures track

32. lack of interest by people who aren’t directly involved in choosing and implementing and using the measures

33. perception that measuring takes too much time and effort

34. not knowing how to start

35. not getting the buy-in or engagement from people to measure

36. not maintaining the commitment to measure

I’m sure if you were to have this conversation in your organisation, you’d come up with a few different symptoms to those listed above, but the majority of them would overlap with those on this list. The power in knowing what problems your performance measurement process has is that when you’re conscious of them, you can do something about them.

And when you understand how the fundamental performance measurement process works, you can figure out how you can do something about them. Part 2 will give you a framework for how to start fixing your performance measurement process.

TAKING ACTION:
Which of the 36 performance measurement process problems have you got right now? Do you have any others, not listed in this article? Note them down, and stay tuned for Part 2 of this article, so you can start diagnosing which parts of your performance measurement process need improvement.

There are at least three good reasons why your authenticity as a performance measurement practitioner really matters. Firstly, people need quite a bit of coaching before they’ll trust performance measurement. Secondly, you’re going to need an energy source to persist until people stop resisting measuring. Thirdly, inspiration works much better than edict at engaging people to measure. Your authenticity boosts all these things.

Want to know how to boost your authenticity?

What do you BELIEVE about performance measurement?

Why do you believe we should measure performance? What do you believe a performance measure really is (and is not)? Do you believe it’s more important to measure people, or processes? Your authenticity comes from well grounded beliefs, not just adopting someone else’s views (not even mine!).

A sample of my beliefs about performance measurement are:

• the purpose of performance measures is to focus us, to give us feedback and to be a fulcrum to leverage faster performance improvement
• milestones, like “implement Project X by December 2011″, are not performance measures
• measures are tools to help people improve performance, not tools to measure people’s performance

What do you KNOW about performance measurement?

How many of the popular performance measurement frameworks do you have a working knowledge of, like the Balanced Scorecard or Performance Prism? What are your favourite performance measurement resources, which you look to regularly to grow your knowledge? Do you know what the most common struggles are that people have with performance measurement? Who are the authors that have most influenced your views of performance measurement?

For me, I relentlessly continue to grow my knowledge about performance measurement. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I love my Measures & More Mastermind Program so much – I get to personally interview and learn from the world’s thought leaders on performance measurement and related subjects.

What are your SKILLS in performance measurement?

Do you know how to make a seemingly immeasurable strategy or goal or objective measurable? Can you design meaningful performance measures when it’s not obvious what the right measures are? Can you define the details needed to ensure that a performance measure is implemented as it was intended to be? Can you design engaging and sensible reports and dashboards?

Much of my own performance measurement skill developed through an eclectic mix of training and experience, including post-graduate study in statistics, quality management and process improvement, neuro linguistic programming, testing and experimenting. These are the roots from which PuMP and the Performance Measure Blueprint have evolved.

What is your EXPERIENCE in performance measurement?

Have you got a journal where you record your personal learning and insights in performance measurement? How have you tailored other people’s approaches to work better for your organisation? Have you got some measurement stories or anecdotes from your personal experience that you use to share performance measurement learning and insights with others?

I create my own mottos, which distill some of the most important lessons I’ve had in performance measurement into simple, shareable reminders:

• patterns, not points (don’t compare this month to last month)
• useful, not just interesting (don’t measure it unless it really matters)
• engagement matters more than excellence (a perfect measure is useless if no-one owns it)

What is your PASSION for performance measurement?

Why do you care about performance measurement? Do you feel compelled to make a real difference in the world? Do you love to help people get focused on goals that matter? What’s your personal vision for performance measurement in your organisation, or in your career?

My personal passion for performance measurement comes from a love of clarity and focus, an intense desire to know rather than assume, a disdain for the waste that comes from uninformed decisions. And my vision is to professionalise the Performance Measurement Practitioner role so we can work together to make performance measurement a natural part of doing business.

Authenticity = Beliefs + Knowledge + Skill + Experience + Passion

When you’re authentic, people are drawn to you. They listen to you, they seek your advice, they ask for your help, they do what you suggest. Authenticity is of paramount importance to every Performance Measurement Practitioner.

TAKING ACTION:
Where could you deepen your own performance measurement authenticity? Pick one thing, do it, and see how you feel, and how others respond to you.