We all collect volumes of qualitative data - the data that made up from words and not numbers - as part of doing business. Qualitative data comes from open-ended questions on customer surveys, comment fields on forms, and other blocks of text we capture in our database systems. We collect it, but do we make the ...

Do your customers fall asleep before they get to the end of your feedback survey? Do they rush through without thinking carefully about your questions, because it's just taking too long? Do you collect loads of feedback on a dozen or more questions, but fail to put it to good use? You definitely need a bit of 'survey zen'.

[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...

How to create a KPI traffic light dashboard or traffic light report to highlight signals in a clear, valid and constructive way, and avoid the 3 big problems. (more…)

How do you feel when you hear the word 'target' at work? Nervous? Anxious? Excited? Motivated? Competitive? That's the funny thing about targets: we often have an emotional response to them, based on whether or not we believe we can meet them. Is that healthy?

Measure Up reader, Rick, opened up this debate again on my first post about whether gauges and dials can work for KPIs with this claim: "When it comes to KPI’s that are not time related gauges still can give fast insights to performance." And a few other readers agreed. But I still don't....

Data collection is a process, not an event. Thinking about it as a process makes it easier to appreciate all the steps that are involved, who is involved in each step and what resources will be needed to make these steps work well. Use the following checklist as a starting point for thinking through the design of your data collection processes.

I'm often asked how to measure people. Managers, executives and human resource professionals all want to know how to cascade company goals to individuals, and put measures in their performance agreements. It's the toughest question I am ever asked, because my answer isn't what they want to hear.

Many people say they don't have the support to do performance measurement, that their leaders or colleagues don't see the value in it. What you need to do is take a different tack, and hook into what your leaders and colleagues *do* see value in. Make it about fixing a problem, not measuring performance.

We want everyone in the organisation to align their results to the organisation's mission, vision and goals. How do you cascade strategy to create alignment? There are two very different ways.