Guest author Terry Fagg, a local government manager, writes a short marketing brief from a fictional consulting firm called Weasel Words Inc. Be warned: this is bad advice!! (more…)

Whether or not you're using the PuMP Measure Design technique to design your measures, you'll do yourself a favour to note these common traps people fall into when designing their measures. Avoid them!

What's the real role of performance measurement? To serve the bureaucratic machine? To keep an eye on employees? To hold executives accountable? Does the role change depending on whose measuring and what they're measuring? I don't believe so. I believe that performance measurement's role is universally comprised of three specific things.

We want people to be engaged - or have buy-in - to performance measures so they will support the implementation of those measures, and use them to improve performance. But dragging them to KPI meetings and presentations, and loading them with lists of measures to review, rarely gets true buy-in. Solution: the Measure Gallery.

Measure Up reader, Kenneth, works in a hospital and has this measurement challenge: "Different people want to follow up on different things. The nurses, for example, think it is crucial to follow up on how many phone calls they answer. I reckon it is because they want evidence to show management how they spend their time at work. But I do not think this is a critical KPI or success fac...

Annual planning has a few drawbacks that result in unachieved targets, wasted time, and exhaustion in the end. We set the goals and targets for the end of the year, but that feels so far away that we often delay our start, fail to respond as the world around us changes, and consequently lose momentum and interest.

Many of us struggle to get the support and buy-in to establish a proper and deliberate performance measurement methodology in our organisations. The timing just isn't right, or you just don't have a compelling enough case yet. One way to get started is to practice your own advice, personally.

One mistake organisations make in performance measurement is to not have a real KPI methodology. They treat measuring performance as an ad hoc activity or event. But when you do adopt a performance measurement methodology, another mistake is to do too ...

Donald Trump Jr., on 21st Century TV, interviewed my friends Howard Rohm (CEO) and Gail Stout Perry (Vice-President of Strategic Solutions) from the Balanced Scorecard Institute. During the interview they shared some great tips about strategy design, specifically with their approach to the Balanced Scorecard. They discussed:

• the problems of the C-Suite designing goals that fail ...

If your KPIs suck, even though you've long wished for better ones, it's likely that something is holding you back. That 'something' could be a very good reason, or it could simply be an excuse that you're mistaking for a reason.