The Performance Measurement Excellence Model

Closing gaps between actual performance and targeted performance – in those areas deliberately selected as strategically important or mission-critical, and consistently done across the whole organisation – is what performance measurement excellence is.

Clearly, depending on how frequently performance gaps are being closed, and how extensively this is occurring across the organisation, your organisation can be at one of several different stages of performance measurement excellence (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Stages of Performance Measurement Excellence

Understanding which stage of performance measurement excellence your organisation is at is very helpful in:

• Identifying and budgeting for improvements required in the performance measurement process
  
  
• Getting people engaged in performance measurement and improvement by showing them what they can aspire to
  
  
• Gauging the success of the performance measurement methodology you choose & implement

The stages of your organisation’s journey to performance excellence are based on the single most important indicator of success for performance measurement: your Performance Excellence Score.

And then how you increase your Performance Excellence Score is dependent on your approach to assessing and improving your performance measurement process. Figure 2 describes the overarching cycle of manaing performance measurement:

Figure 2: Managing your Performance Measurement Process

Download the Performance Measurement Excellence White Paper to guide you as you follow the steps below to assess and improve your organisation's Performance Measurement Excellence:

STEP 1: Assess your current stage of Performance Measurement Excellence

STEP 2: Analyse the strengths and weaknesses of your current performance measurement system

STEP 3: Improve your performance measurement process

STEP 1: Assess your current stage of Performance Measurement Excellence.

The Performance Excellence Score is the percentage of people within your organisation who are continually improving strategically important or mission-critical performance results, guided by their measures (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: the Performance Excellence Score

This is the measure of the ultimate outcome of good performance measurement: that everyone is involved in continual performance improvement that causes the organisation to excel at what it exists to do.

The White Paper mentioned above will show you how to calculate your organisation's Performance Excellence Score, either with a sample of employees or with an educated guess.

STEP 2: Analyse the strengths and weaknesses of your current performance measurement system.

If you're serious about finding more meaningful performance measures that truly will improve your organisation's performance, you need to improve your performance measurement process.

The PuMP Assessment is a great tool to not only help you quantify where your performance measurement process needs improvement, but it's also a great way to learn and discuss the attributes of a very good performance measurement process.

The PuMP Assessment is a very detailed and thorough set of questions to scrutinize and evaluate your performance measurement process. The Performance Measurement Excellence White Paper provides a subset of these questions, to get you warmed up.

Take the PuMP Assessment Online

Here's how to complete a PuMP Assessment online (and help us build a database so you can benchmark against other organisations):

1. Make sure you have access to a printer, to print each page of the survey as you complete it. This is the only way at this stage for you to get a copy of your own PuMP Assessment results.
   
   
2. Go to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/pumpassessment and answer all the questions.
   
   
3. At the end of the assessment, you will receive a link to view the summary report of all assessments undertaken to date. You can return to that link anytime to view the summary report as more and more people take the assessment.
   
   
4. Compare your responses (from your printout) with the summary report to see how you compare to others.

You may like to also keep a copy of your assessment in a spreadsheet to analyse in more depth, or make comparisons between your departments or business units. To help you do this, you can download the PuMP Assessment Kit (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Excerpt of the PuMP Assessment Kit

The PuMP Assessment tool comes with a pdf instruction booklet, and two data capture and analysis spreadsheets, one for if you do the assessment as a group consensus, and one for if you do the assessment through individual interviews.

• Download the PuMP Assessment Kit (zip)

STEP 3: Improve your performance measurement process.

PuMP® is systematic methodology for designing and improving performance measurement systems. It provides a backbone of sorts, to build your performance measurement process around. This backbone is seven specific and essential activities that link together for the selection, implementation and use of performance measures.

There are several ways you can access the PuMP® techniques, either via online learning, self-paced How-to Kits, live training workshops or in-house consulting programs. The most popular ways that people get started with PuMP® are via:

• the Performance Measure Blueprint Workshop (available publically and in-house)
  
  
• the Performance Measure Blueprint Online Program (self-paced webinar program)

 

Stacey Barr
the Performance Measure Specialist