Archive for the ‘Performance Measurement Process’ Category

If there’s still some uncertainty or cynicism about performance measurement in your organisation, I’d suggest don’t rush in and try and implement a corporate-wide performance measurement approach all at once. You’ll probably get more traction by starting your performance measurement journey with a pilot.

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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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You depend on the quality of data and information to provide a stable foundation for your decision making. Decision making often involves responding to something, so you need your data to validly describe what you are responding to so that you choose the right responses.

Whether your data is quantitative (based on numbers) or qualitative (based on perceptions), it’s integrity depends on 5 widely recognised qualities.

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Your performance measures are there to give you advice about what is going on in your business so you can choose the most appropriate way to manage its performance. This means that you will choose different types of actions depending on what kind of advice your measure is giving you, or, what kind of signal it’s giving off.

There are seven important performance signals you’ll want to look for, and be prepared to respond to when you see them:

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Possibly at the root of all objections people have to measuring performance and having KPIs is their beliefs about why we do it. Before you can successfully overcome all the other typical objections people have – like not having the time, not knowing where to start, not seeing the need for it – you need to be sure first and foremost that people understand the real reasons why we measure performance.

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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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Haste makes waste, they say. And you can see it plain as day in how many organisations go about measuring performance.

They tack a brainstorming session onto the annual planning workshop and wonder why the measures they end up with aren’t relevant to their goals, why no-one really has ownership of the measures, why the measures don’t bring insight to decision making. Measurement is a process, not an event! It’s a process that takes time and effort to do properly. And it’s one of those things that you’re better off not doing at all if you don’t do it properly.

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