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...

When Alex Osborn invented the creativity technique called brainstorming, I wonder if he had any idea just how extensively business would apply it. Almost every meeting employs some kind of brainstorming event, but there’s one meeting that really should leave it off the agenda: the performance measure or KPI selection meeting. Read this article and get tips for how to

Performance Appraisal, Individual Performance Review, Personal Performance Development Plan. There are numerous names for this artifact of the post-1990’s organisation, but they are names for basically the same concept: the measurement, review, evaluation and management of the performance of an employee. And it is one of the most contentious management processes of them all! Read some th...

If people don’t share a single, sharply focused, easily imaginable vision of a result they want to create, any effort to measure that result will waste time. And if you do successfully get some measures established, it’s likely they just won’t stimulate the excitement and motivation needed to make the result happen. Read this article and get tips for

Many decision support tools sport the concept of traffic lighting, the visual flagging of performance measures in terms of whether they are going well, going badly or looking a bit ordinary. And doesn’t that make decision making a whole lot easier! You don’t have to analyse and interpret every single measure to determine if you need to respond to it or not, because the coloured