There are no professional guidelines (yet) which define what it means to be a Performance Measurement Leader - not like there are for Accountants, Project Managers, Finance Officers and Engineers. So there's little wonder that there are so many talented and capable performance measurement practitioners out there who are underselling themselves. Are you one of them? Find out with this quiz: ...

What is a Corporate Performance Office, will it really help you implement KPIs for strategic performance improvement, and do you really need one? (more…)

You're not truly implementing performance measurement - nor getting the gains it will deliver - if you don't have your staff, your colleagues and your managers engaged. Nor do you have to wait until they are engaged before you get started! Adapting John Kotter's process for leading change, which he details in his book "Leading Change", here are 8 steps you can follow, as the performance lead...

If you think about when organisations work well, it's because all the parts are coordinated together and managed as an integrated whole. And that's a very good reason why we ought to treat our performance measures the same.

Most performance measures or KPIs tell you what happened. But if we're really going to manage company or organisational performance, we need to know something about what's going to happen. And that's what lead indicators do. They are a special breed of performance measure or KPI because they have predictive power.

Milestones are commonly used as KPIs or performance measures. But they are not performance measures because they fail a few essential tests of what makes a meaningful performance measure.

It happens all the time: we inadvertently measure the same thing, more than once in our businesses and end up with two or more different versions of the truth.

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...

We almost all do it: hang on to performance measures that we really don't need. Believe me, measuring what doesn't matter does more harm than good! When you're measuring what doesn't matter, you're using up resources better spent analysing and improving, rather than reporting. And people's focus will be fractured by the sheer volume of data that's put in front of them.

We want people to buy in to KPIs, metrics and measures, because it's through people that measuring performance becomes improving performance. But they don't buy in because it's boring, it's often used as a big stick, and it's not easy to meaningfully measure what matters. What can you do?