Some people love targets and many people hate them. They will avoid locking in targets, they will set them low enough to be within their known capability, and they will make excuses about why they don't reach them. Hardly the kind of behaviour that drives performance improvement.

With a new calendar year just around the corner, you might be thinking about New Year's Resolutions. These are goals just like any other: if you're serious about achieving them, you must measure them...

A typical way to set targets is to calculate a target for the year, and then apportion it to each month in that year. The idea is to keep everyone focused on achieving the target, so increase the likelihood the annual target will be met. But it doesn't work. ...

In performance improvement, a few important terms are often confused or misused. So, exactly what are benchmarks, baselines, targets and standards? (more…)

Performance measures aren’t doing their best work when you treat them as a tick-and-flick monitoring tool. They are only giving you one angle on performance. Often the insights you need will come from a richer story that needs more characters to give a fuller picture.

You won’t find true signals of changes in performance by looking at month-to-month comparisons, or trendlines, or moving averages. The signals you really need to know about, the only signals that you ought to respond to, are revealed through one particular graph only.

Measure Upsubscriber Suzanne asks "How do you set targets using historical data?" It's a great question, because it acknowledges something that most people don't appreciate about target setting.

Statistical thinking is not so much about having knowledge of and being able to apply statistical techniques. It’s NOT about knowing how to perform a regression analysis or knowing the formula for putting a trend line through a time series.