Is it even possible to measure the impact of measurement? And if we could, why would we bother? (more…)

No KPI can ever give you perfect evidence of your goals. But too often we overestimate how good a KPI needs to be, to be "right". The truth is, KPIs aren't ever "right". You just want to be sure they are "not wrong".

Over the past 10 years of Measure Up's life, over 13,000 subscribers have shared their biggest KPI questions with me. Almost 90% of all those questions come down to a core set of 11 questions. Only one of these is the right question to answer first.

KPIs or performance measures are like clothes: they each have a certain fit, use, purpose and lifetime. But it's usually quite more obvious when to retire a garment than it is to retire a KPI. (...

The project team gets together and sets the scope of their KPI project. They outline the steps that need to be followed. They specify how much time to allow for each step. They define the report to be delivered at the end of the project. Then they call for quotes from KPI consultants. And even though this hasn't worked in the past, they wonder why it doesn't work again.

Too often we assume that performance measurement depends on technical systems, like a business intelligence system or dashboard application. But for performance measurement to become entrenched in how our organisations work, it's the non-technical systems that matter most.

[4 stars] I read the first couple of pages of this free e-book and started to feel excited that finally a dashboard software vendor had come to understand what good performance measurement involved. The more I read, the more curious I became: so many of the ideas were almost identical to the ideas and techniques in PuMP. Then I learned that the author, Clive Keyte of Intrafocus.com, had been...

With these 7 steps, we can make just enough time to measure and improve performance, and ultimately create more time for even better measurement and improvement. (mor...

Much of the time and effort that goes into measuring performance is rework. We rethink why we're measuring, we rethink what we're measuring, and we rethink how we're measuring. Sometimes this rethinking is important. But most of the time it's complete waste.

My client D.K. asks: "What terminology can we use to understand the different types of performance measures and KPIs?" (more…)