Archive | 2008

Target vs. Goal

While most people don’t distinguish between goals and objectives in every day conversation, I find that performance management practitioners sometimes use the word goal when they really mean target. This potential confusion between objectives and targets explains why I usually recommend against using the term goal when establishing a standard performance management terminology. From my…

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Logic Model

While it dates back to the 1970s, the Logic Model gained prominence in the 1990s largely in response to the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA). The Logic Model provides organizations with a framework for understanding the relation between resources or inputs (what an organization invests); activities or outputs (what an organization gets done); and…

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Big Bang Performance Management

Performance management vendors often say adopting their tools must be done all at once, starting at the top of the organization. They argue that, without executive buy-in, a performance management deployment will not have the mandate needed to succeed. Furthermore, the argument continues, without an enterprise data warehouse and reporting tools deployed to every desktop, employees…

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Focused Organizations

As Balanced Scorecard practitioners know, Kaplan and Norton recommend five principles for strategy focused organizations: translate the strategy to operational terms; align the organization to the strategy; make strategy everyone’s everyday job; make strategy a continual process; and mobilize leadership for change. The City of Charlotte, NC applied these principles to become a Balanced Scorecard…

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More Gloom Than Doom

Over at Slate, Zachary Meisel and Jesse Pines have a sensationalist article entitled Waiting Doom that describes how hospitals are killing emergency room patients. They claim Esmin Green’s death was caused by the length of time she waited in the E.R. which they blame on the hospital practice of boarding inpatients. In their words, Despite increasing evidence that crowded E.R.s can…

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Strategy vs. Planning

For several years, I’ve argued that performance management is more than just budgeting. I’ve also pointed out that the term planning was often misused by software vendors whose products were mostly limited to financial planning (aka budgeting), rather than end-to-end resource allocation and management. And finally, I’ve advocated outcome-based budgeting, rather than activity-based budgeting, so…

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Analysts on Strategy Management

Readers of this blog will know I have a deep affinity for a portion of Performance Management that has come to be known as Strategy Management. The most obvious explanation for my passion is the fact I ran a company often cited as pushing the envelope in strategy management. However, I’ve also always felt the…

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Ghost in the blog

Recently, I was talking to this friend of mine (don’t you love stories that start this way?) who told me there’s an edict in her very-large-company that every executive should have an internal blog. The blog would serve as a way of explaining each executive’s departmental priorities, provide visibility to important issues that would benefit…

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Measuring Virtual Events

Partially due to corporate sustainability reasons and partly due to old-fashioned cost savings, I’ve been thinking a lot about virtual events lately. The idea behind virtual events is pretty simple – rather than flying thousands of people to a single destination to discuss a series of topics, you have these discussions on-line. While simple in…

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