Archive for the ‘Improving Performance’ Category

IN THIS EPISODE:

Introduction: The motivation and purpose of this Measure Up podcast.
Article: Do Universally Perfect KPIs Exist?
Q&A: How to use KPI’s for performance improvement not traditional training KPI’s
Quick Tip: Where KPIs or performance measures fit into your strategic or operational plans.

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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.

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In his book, “10-Minute Toughness”, 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.

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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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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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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.

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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.

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We all know that what you measure influences people’s behaviour. So if you want people to collaborate to improve corporate performance, rather than compete to improve personal performance (often at the expense of corporate performance), think carefully about what you measure!

Here are 5 practical steps to help your team to measure in way that will encourage collaboration to improve corporate performance, and help put an end to measures that trigger fights about who’s right and who’s wrong, rather than dialogue about how to achieve shared goals.

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Your performance data is trying to tell you something. Something deeper and richer and more insightful than just whether or not you’re on track to hit your target. Can you hear it? Probably not, unless you’re already doing these six practices to hear your data’s story.

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You hear it a lot, don’t you? That you should only measure what you can control. Hogwash! The most powerful measures are those that track what you can only influence.

Let’s take a closer look at how to measure to expand your influence – and get much more meaningful results.

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