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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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You’re not truly implementing performance measurement – nor getting the gains it will deliver – if you don’t have your staff, your colleagues and your managers engaged. Nor do you have to wait until they are engaged before you get started!

Adapting John Kotter’s process for leading change, which he details in his book “Leading Change”, here are 8 steps you can follow, as the performance leader that you are, to engage people in measuring performance:

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If you think about when organisations work well, it’s because all the parts are coordinated together and managed as an integrated whole. And that’s a very good reason why we ought to treat our performance measures the same.

By understanding how measures are related to one another, you increase their power to help you understand and diagnose performance, and thus how you can report those measures together to make performance understanding and diagnosis easier.

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Most performance measures or KPIs tell you what happened. But if we’re really going to manager company or organisational performance, we need to know something about what’s going to happen.

And that’s what lead indicators do. They are a special breed of performance measure or KPI because they have predictive power.

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“Complete business process review by June 2010″ and “Implement customer relationship management system by December 2009″ and “New workplace safety policy in place” are NOT performance measures, despite how often they appear as such in business and strategic plans and despite what many performance measure practitioners and experts might say.

They’re not performance measures because they fail a few essential tests of what makes a meaningful performance measure.

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