Archive for the ‘Making Strategy Measurable’ Category
#73 – Are Your Goals Measure-Worthy?
There are indeed a few different opinions out there about what makes a goal worth measuring. So why are so many of our goals so hard to meaningfully measure?
Don’t try to be SMART…
The SMART acronym is too confusing. People don’t know whether goals should be SMART or whether performance measures should be SMART. They don’t know what “specific” really means (that’s what the S stands for). They aren’t sure if R stands for realistic or relevant. And if A is for achievable then does that mean you can’t have stretch goals?
To write great goals, asking these four questions is all you need:
#54 The 5 Essential Parts of a Dust-Repellent Strategic Plan
Lots of strategic plans and operational plans are full of motherhood goals, vague strategies and – if they are even considered at all – measures or KPIs that don’t track anything useful. No wonder these plans sit on shelves and gather dust.
#46 Why You Can’t Measure Your Performance Outcomes…
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…
#37 The Third of Three Things I Don’t Like About The Balanced Scorecard (It’s not a measurement methodology)
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:
#36 The Second of Three Things I Don’t Like About The Balanced Scorecard (the perspectives are too limiting)
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:
#35 The First of Three Things I Don’t Like About The Balanced Scorecard (It’s hard to cascade meaningfully)
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.
#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.
#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.
#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?
#15 Activities, Outputs and Outcomes! Oh My!
As practitioners in the Land of Performance Measurement, we have our own version of Dorothy’s ‘Lions and tigers and bears’ in the Land of Oz.
We have activities, outputs and outcomes. Creatures that seem so much more frightening than they truly are, and mostly because we don’t really understand whether and how we are supposed to measure them.
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