Sometimes I think performance management is invading my personal life. A student I have been mentoring happily announced during one of our recent meetings that she had gotten a 46 on her latest algebra quiz. I’m no math major but normally any score under 60 is a failing grade. How could she be so pleased…
Every once in a while an idea comes along that’s so simple but so compelling that it sticks in my head for days. It also makes me wonder, “Why the heck didn’t I think of that?” An exchangeable tank for your gas grill fits the bill. So does the iPod. But not the Internet –…
If you’ve attended one of my performance management workshops, you know I caution against using the traditional traffic light metaphor to represent performance. Yes, the visual is nearly universally understood (green = good, red = not good) and simple communication is indeed a key to improving performance. However, in many business situations, three states are…
I lost a day. Actually, I didn’t lose it so much as it didn’t exist. At least for me. Here’s how it happened. On Friday, Sept 1 2006 I boarded a 14-hour overnight flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong. I had been shortchanging my sleep all week so I was exhausted and fell asleep…
In response to my earlier post titled “What’s In A Name”, a reader named Stephen agrees that financial and workforce performance management are different things but asks: “… what’s IT performance management or operational performance management? Is the product [needed to support them] any different?” Point taken, Stephen. I used the terms but never defined them. Outside…
I’ve been on the road for the last two weeks so it’s only in the last couple of days that I’ve been able to catch up with some of the items on my to-do list. This morning I listened to a Web seminar that provided a three-step method for moving from basic measures to key performance…
Quick, what’s the difference between a scorecard and a dashboard? Scorecard and report card? Dashboard and portal? If scorecards are supposed to be balanced, are dashboards inherently unbalanced? And with all of the hubbub surrounding digital dashboards, what ever happened to the analog report? Admittedly, these questions are a bit tongue and cheek but the…
Yesterday a colleague asked me “Is there any tangible value in deploying a performance management system?” The question took me by surprise because she wasn’t asking if there was any value in automating using a software package but rather whether there was any documented value in performance management itself. I assured her that performance management…
While certainly not based on the scientific method, I think it’s safe to say the phrase “performance management” has become mainstream. A web search for the phrase returns over 14 million results. By comparison, a search for the phrase “customer relationship management” – a market that is at least a decade more mature – returns…
Ask someone to describe the culture of companies in Silicon Valley and you’re likely to get responses like “unstructured”, “entrepreneurial”, and “decentralized.” Ask for examples of how they differ from their East Coast counterparts and you might hear about Friday afternoon beer bashes, T-shirts and jeans every day of the week, or the proliferation of…