Archive | scorecard

Holiday week ramblings

Some performance management ramblings to kick off your holiday week: (A) Barry suggests Four Questions To Ask When Building Your First Strategy Map:  What’s the advantage that differentiates us from our competitors? What are the three most important things we need to measure to drive that advantage? What are the three most significant gaps or barriers…

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Top 10 Books on Performance Management

People frequently ask me which book they should read to learn more about strategy and performance management. While there are many books worth reading, I don’t think there’s a single book that gives you a complete enough view.  Both strategy and performance management come in many flavors, and you have to read several books to appreciate the breadth….

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Dashboard Data

Dash-bored

If you weren’t convinced that dashboards have become over-hyped, these two Dilbert strips that appeared last week should be the final straw:    (Click twice to enlarge the comics) The intellectual side of me would like to defend our profession and chalk these up as simply cartoons designed to elicit a laugh.  Unfortunately, they are…

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The More Things Change

Does the following resonate with you? “It seems that everywhere you turn, people are talking about performance management; vendors, consultants, press, public sector and commercial organizations alike. Amidst the buzz however, one troubling trend is beginning to emerge. Many performance management projects have languished, burdened by unrealistic expectations, delayed schedules, and intangible benefits. Performance management…

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Alignment Focused Organization

By now, most of us have read about organizations that attempted to improve their performance by deploying dashboards populated with financial and operational metrics only to discover that managing by numbers alone didn’t improve their performance. Instead, organizations must go beyond keeping score to ensure that everyone has a common understanding of both what they are trying…

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Shot Heard Around The World

If you’re in or around the performance management market, you’ve no doubt already heard about SAP’s acquisition of Pilot Software. If you only read the official press release which describes it as a “tuck-in” acquisition, you might not realize how significant an event this really was. Certainly the analysts seem supportive; John Hagerty of AMR…

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Should You Have An Imbalanced Scorecard?

Balanced scorecards should sometimes be imbalanced. Over in the PMA Forum, Alan Meeks suggests the word balance is counterproductive, as it’s impractical to assign equal weight to each of the four perspectives. He argues for a ‘genuinely systemic scorecard’ – not nearly as catchy, is it? As I replied, the original intent of the term balance was…

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Automating Measurement Mania

Several years ago, I visited a U.S. government agency that tracked more than 1000 different performance measures representing nearly every aspect of their operations. The measures came from multiple operational systems, a dozen or more Excel workbooks, and several employee and citizen surveys. The entire process was automated, allowing many of the measures to be updated daily…

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