Author Archive

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.

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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.

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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:

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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?

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Let’s take a peek at what a typical week might hold for a happy Performance Measurement Practitioner:

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There are no professional guidelines (yet) which define what it means to be a Performance Measurement Practitioner – not like there are for Accountants, Project Managers, Finance Officers and Engineers. So there’s little wonder that there are so many talented and capable performance measurement practitioners out there who are underselling themselves.

Are you one of them? Find out with this quiz:

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They’re popping up like mushrooms after ground-soaking rains: the Corporate Performance Office, a small team of people devoted to developing, coordinating, and facilitating their organisation’s performance measurement and management system, from top to bottom, left to right, and back to front. But do YOU really need one too?

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In the first part of this three part series, I posed the first challenge that I face with the Balanced Scorecard: it is hard to cascade meaningfully. And in part two was the second challenge: the Balanced Scorecard perspectives are too limiting.

The third thing I don’t like about it is this:

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In the first part of this three part series, I posed the first challenge that I face with the Balanced Scorecard: it is hard to cascade meaningfully.

The second thing I don’t like about it is this:

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We have to applaud the Balanced Scorecard for the evolution it triggered in organisational performance measurement and strategy execution. But no model is without its limitations.

Certainly, on account of the Balanced Scorecard, we’re now seeing the measurement of non-financial results rather than just the financial, and we’re seeing strategies laid out in logical and cause-effect linked plans designed for execution rather than shelving.

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