Industry benchmarking is popular, but it's hard to find good benchmarks. Here's why, and what the new role of benchmarking should be in performance improvement. (more…)

When KPI targets are continually missed, when can they be reassessed without being accused of shifting the goalposts? (more…)

Quotas make us chase numbers as a substitute for fixing problems. That's the opposite of what good performance measurement should do. (more…)

KPI thresholds are not improvement tools; they make people react in a rush to quick fixes and gaming that end up making performance worse. (more…)

Setting and achieving performance targets for KPIs is about the heart, not just the head. (more…)

Lag measures cannot be improved directly; only through changing one or more of their lead measures. And there are six basic steps to make this happen. (more&h...

Performance cannot ever be maximised because there will always be constraints. When the constraint is budget, the real question is how to get the best performance within that budget. The answer lies in who defines ‘performance’.

In our search for how to choose meaningful targets for our KPIs and performance measures, we often look for a procedure or a formula to set the right KPI target value. But what we ought to do before that, is check if the conditions are right for any KPI target to work.

I fundamentally disagree that we should be striving to hit our KPI targets each month (or whatever frequency we measure at). Natural variability guarantees it's purely a fluke if we hit a target in any given month. We need targets to make more sense.

Most performance measures or KPIs will have targets. After all, we have them to focus us on improving performance. But that focus can fracture if we don't take care in how we express our measures and our targets, so they speak the same language.