Most people in business know they need feedback from customers in order to make service delivery and product design more in line with customer needs and expectations. But too often, the process of measuring customer satisfaction and perception is made more complex and convoluted than it needs to be. Here is a simple approach that gives you

Buy-in is that state when people are committed to something, when they are convinced of its worth for them and no longer have objections or fears that get in their way of adopting it. It’s when they feel a sense of ownership about it. Most of us want our people to feel this way about KPIs and performance measurement, but we don't realise that we might actually be getting in the way of b...

The report design working group sat around the table, sifting through the draft strategic performance report to suggest how to make it more useful. Measure by measure, they chatted and suggested and critiqued and debated:

• “this one would look better if it was a bar chart”
• “yeah, I like the three-dimensional bar charts”
• “we should add another line to this ...

The typical approach executive teams use to cascade, or roll out or decompose or align, their strategic direction is:

1. produce a clear set of goals, objectives, critical success factors or a scorecard
2. then get each departmental or functional manager to take this onboard and customize it for their part of the organisation.

The trouble then begins… Read thi...

In my early years as a performance measurement practitioner, before Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard was published and only just as organisations were waking up to the realisation they needed more performance information than the profit and loss statement, the most common way to choose performance measures was to hire the big consultancies to research and write a “this is what you need to...

We all love a chart or graphs that tells us how things are trending. And while there are lots of ways explore trends (or changes over time) in performance results, one of the most commonly used is the moving or rolling average. Are you using these? If so, you might want to find out why your interpre...

How do you know if your decision process is well-informed or ill-informed? And even if you could detect the clues of an ill-informed decision process, would you know what to do about it? Here are some ideas for how to get more rigour into your decision process by sliding a little further away from fal...

A management team distributes themselves around the board room table, the ritual of the monthly performance management meeting begins. Before too long, the first performance measure in the monthly report is under their scrutiny. It seems that supply costs have increased and now the procurement manager is under scrutiny. He deftly deflects the result with the explanation that a major supplie...

5 Stars -- Simply & lucidly: the basics of performance measurement

What I like most about this little book is the simplicity and lucidity with which it demonstrates what performance measurement is fundamentally about. Embedded within a fictional but entirely realistic story about one company's discovery of performance measurement, is a straightforward methodology for designing and...

Make quantitative information useful for decision making

I have heard this book described as a really good coffee-table book. It's content, while often technical and very much focused on the theory of graphs and diagrams and data and information, very practically demonstrates the impact of how quantitative information is visually presented, and shows many alternatives...