Robert D. Behn is a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a passionate advocate for public sector performance. His regular Performance Leadership Report is always succinct and salient. His definition of performance management, versus performance measurement, clearly puts the responsibility on leade...

Work stress, projects behind schedule, and low productivity are all symptoms of an underlying problem with workload variability. You'll feel it as some months you can't get the important things even started, and other months you're pushing productivity past the redline. The solution lies in measuring the variation in workload, and not just the amount of it.

I've written about two very powerful graphs to use on performance dashboards, or in performance reports that need to be concise: my version of Stephen Few's bullet graph, and my version of Edward Tufte's sparkline (my version is called a smartline). Is one better than the other?

The world loves Stephen Few's bullet graph. It's small, concise and speaks volumes about the comparison between current performance and targeted performance. It's a prodigious improvement on dashboard gauges. In constructing a bullet graph, however, you have options. Here's the one I recommend...

Whether you're an executive looking for the right person to lead your corporate performance measure implementation, or you're a strategy or performance professional wanting to position yourself as a performance measurement expert, you need to understand what mastery in the field of performance measurement looks like. You need to be able to recognise someone who possesses this mastery.

Do your customers fall asleep before they get to the end of your feedback survey? Do they rush through without thinking carefully about your questions, because it's just taking too long? Do you collect loads of feedback on a dozen or more questions, but fail to put it to good use? You definitely need a bit of 'survey zen'.

[4 stars] I read the first couple of pages of this free e-book and started to feel excited that finally a dashboard software vendor had come to understand what good performance measurement involved. The more I read, the more curious I became: so many of the ideas were almost identical to the ideas and techniques in PuMP. Then I learned that the author, Clive Keyte of Intrafocus.com, had been...

How to create a KPI traffic light dashboard or traffic light report to highlight signals in a clear, valid and constructive way, and avoid the 3 big problems. (more…)

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.

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?