Author Archive
#31 Milestones Do Not Make Meaningful Performance Measures
“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.
#30 Measure Once, Cut Twice: How To Remove Duplication and Distrust From Your Performance Measures
It happens all the time: we inadvertently measure the same thing, more than once in our businesses and end up with two or more different versions of the truth.
Not only does it waste effort in the measurement process, but it wastes time in decision making. Which version of the truth do you trust?
Whenever this nasty problem shows up, here are 5 ways you can cut it back down to size:
#29 Three Ways to Toss Those Time-Wasting Measures
We almost all do it: hang on to performance measures that we really don’t need.
Believe me, measuring what doesn’t matter does more harm than good! When you’re measuring what doesn’t matter, you’re using up resources better spent analysing and improving, rather than reporting. And people’s focus will be fractured by the sheer volume of data that’s put in front of them.
#28 Tackling 7 Common Objections to People Engaging in Performance Measures and KPIs
We want people to buy in to KPIs, metrics and measures, because it’s through people that measuring performance becomes improving performance. But they don’t buy in because it’s boring, it’s often used as a big stick, and it’s not easy to meaningfully measure what matters.
What can you do?
#27 Should Performance Measurement Go On The Backburner When Times Get Tough?
Measuring performance takes time, effort and money. You have to stop your “real work” to figure out what’s worth measuring and set up the data capture and reporting to measure it.
So in times like these, when everyone’s cutting budgets, downsizing and cancelling non-core projects, should performance measurement go on the backburner too?
Imagine that you do stop investing in performance measurement now, because times are tougher.
#26 How to Isolate the Effect of Your Strategy and Test its True Impact
Don’t even try and work out how much time, effort, money and opportunity we waste by investing in business strategies that don’t truly work. Let’s instead talk about how exactly we can go about executing our strategies in a way that tests if they’re working, by isolating their effect on our desired performance results.
These effect-isolating methods have been around for donkey’s years, and they’re really quite simple too, but sadly under-used as part of an organisation’s or company’s strategy execution.
#25 Five Reasons Executives Support Performance Measurement
There are some very good reasons why managers and executives DO give time and resources to performance measurement. And understanding these reasons is your key to reframing the value that performance measurement can have for the manager or executive who so far has no interest in supporting it.
#24 Your 9-Point Performance Culture Change Management Plan
Most performance measurement systems are never fully brought to life because of poor change management. The following prompts are a framework to design your performance measurement system, acknowledging that it is a change process, just like any other initiative your organisation faces in the spirit of continuous improvement and adaptation.
#23 Five Steps to Find The Right Measures
How to find the right measures is the most asked question in the field of performance measurement. And it’s little wonder, because the more meaningful measures track outcomes which tend to be less tangible than the traditional things we’ve measured, like how many widgets we produced.
How do you translate results so intangible as employee morale or service quality or corporate image into solid, robust measures?
#22 Why Won’t People Commit To Their Goals?
There are many reasons why people won’t stay committed to their goals, but it’s much easier to work with the reasons why they will stay committed. Here are four of those reasons, expressed as tactics you can deploy to make it much easier for people to keep to their goals.
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