It's an emotional thing, performance reporting and dashboarding. Executives give up the precious little time they have for their families to instead paw through piles of strategic reports often more than an inch thick (or several drilldowns deep). Or they leave the pile of reports on their desk, or give their performance dashboard a quick glance, but then make decisions from their guts inst...

The management team sit around the monthly performance report, debating. But they’re not debating the interpretation of the trends or signals in the data. They’re not debating the causes that sit beneath those trends or signals. And they’re not debating the pros and cons of various performance improvement ideas. No, they’re debating

Are you accidentally adopting these 8 ways to make your survey useless? Find out how to create successful surveys. (more…)

Winning awards, completing projects and initiatives on time, meeting budget, counting widgets, annual surveys, and whatever we can find at the back of the ‘performance measure pantry’ that was left over from last year – they are all ugly measures! But how can you find meaningful measures and KPIs, without going around in circles, or wasting more time? If you’re stuck with this sort of thi...

Most people in business know they need feedback from customers in order to make service delivery and product design more in line with customer needs and expectations. But too often, the process of measuring customer satisfaction and perception is made more complex and convoluted than it needs to be. Here is a simple approach that gives you

Buy-in is that state when people are committed to something, when they are convinced of its worth for them and no longer have objections or fears that get in their way of adopting it. It’s when they feel a sense of ownership about it. Most of us want our people to feel this way about KPIs and performance measurement, but we don't realise that we might actually be getting in the way of b...

The report design working group sat around the table, sifting through the draft strategic performance report to suggest how to make it more useful. Measure by measure, they chatted and suggested and critiqued and debated:

• “this one would look better if it was a bar chart”
• “yeah, I like the three-dimensional bar charts”
• “we should add another line to this ...

The typical approach executive teams use to cascade, or roll out or decompose or align, their strategic direction is:

1. produce a clear set of goals, objectives, critical success factors or a scorecard
2. then get each departmental or functional manager to take this onboard and customize it for their part of the organisation.

In my early years as a performance measurement practitioner, before Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard was published and only just as organisations were waking up to the realisation they needed more performance information than the profit and loss statement, the most common way to choose performance measures was to hire the big consultancies to research and write a “this is what you need to...

We all love a chart or graphs that tells us how things are trending. And while there are lots of ways explore trends (or changes over time) in performance results, one of the most commonly used is the moving or rolling average. Are you using these? If so, you might want to find out why your interpretati...