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...

Certainly one of the biggest objections to measuring performance is the amount of time and effort it takes to do it properly. Executives, managers and staff alike somehow believe that it should be fast and easy, a trivial task they can just 'get out of the way' and go back to their 'real work'. It's because they believe in the same BIG lie.

The following case study is an excerpt from my book, Practical Performance Measurement: Using the PuMP Blueprint for Fast, Easy and Engaging KPIs. It's about how a team in the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States used a simple performance measure to dra...

Jack Phillips' 6 levels of measures for training is an excellent framework. Here is an example of how to use that framework to measure the effectiveness of training, beyond just satisfaction.

If you're stuck for what to start measuring, there is one category of performance that is important to every organisation or business in every sector, industry and country. It's waste, in all its forms. Which of the four categories matters most to you right now?

Back in the 1990s process thinking was all the rage. Organisations world-wide were identifying their core business processes, mapping and flowcharting and doing Six Sigma and Lean and BPR to ramp up business performance. Was it just a fad?

Do you have KPIs or measures that are lurking lifelessly and in large numbers in your performance reports? No-one ever goes near them, and they refuse to die despite all the usual arguments to get rid of them. You have Zombie KPIs.

We slice, we dice, we tabulate, we chart, we dashboard and then we draw conclusions. But how often have we drawn diabolically incorrect conclusions because we have violated the two basic principles of understanding our measures?

Can you prove that measuring and monitoring people's performance actually does improve the performance of the organisation? I'll be you can't. A very fundamental dynamic prevents it.

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.