Archive | 2006

A Caution on Using Traffic Lights for Performance

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…

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Operational, IT, or Financial?

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…

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Scorecards vs. Dashboards

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…

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Performance Management’s Value

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…

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The HP Way

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…

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