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…
Author Archive | Jonathan Becher
Better Planning and Budgeting
Over at Intelligent Enterprise, an article entitled “How to Get to Better Planning and Budgeting” provides five questions every finance organization should ask: Is the planning and budgeting process as strategic as it could be? Are the budgets as accurate as they should be? Does your planning really help increase your company’s agility? Could your…
Are SMART Goals Stupid?
While I don’t know if I’m “Smarter than a Fifth Grader”, I assumed that I was smarter than a goldfish. But when I read Contrarian Goldfish’s “Smart Goals are Stupid”, I began to wonder. After all, I wrote about the usefulness of SMART objectives. So, let’s investigate: 1. Specific CG says “you cannot predict the…
Beat The Odds
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged a book but on the plane back from Germany I stumbled on an email that Nenshad sent me back in Feb with an excerpt from Chapter 9 of “Beat the Odds: Avoid Corporate Death and Build a Resilient Enterprise” by Robert A. Rudzki. In a section called measure…
Performance Anxiety
Bernard Marr must be a believer in my theory that catchy headlines promote increased readership. How else to explain that the long-time performance management guru resorted to the titillating title “Performance Anxiety” for an otherwise solid article on the potential perils of poorly implemented performance systems? Bernard observes that “performance management initiatives were often so…
Trusted Information
I was deep in conversation with an executive about how to make scorecards more actionable when he said something like: I understand that I should focus on KPIs that are red and trending down but, honestly, I don’t trust the data. This is perhaps the true Achilles Heel of Performance management. If end users don’t trust…
I beg to differ
There hasn’t been enough debate on this blog recently so I’m hoping this post will stir things up a bit. Over at the other guys, Frank wrote a post titled EPM and Strategy Management that I had to read four or five times to understand. Even now, I’m not completely sure what he’s getting at. My confusion…
Planning vs. Budgeting
Openly, I get annoyed when people use the term planning to describe budgeting. While the terms planning and budgeting are often used interchangeably, they’re not the same thing. Budgeting is how you allocate resources (typically financial) to reach specific objectives. Budgeting helps you create an estimate of income and expenses for a specific time period. Budgeting manages money…
Achilles’ other heel
Avisen certainly intrigued me with a post called The Achilles heal (sic) of Performance Management. It’s widely agreed that many performance management projects deliver less value than originally promised. The issue is so endemic that a colleague once asked me “Does performance management have any value?” Imagine my disappointment when, after wading through nearly 1000 words of…
Timing of Blogs
One of the advantages of using WordPress for my blog is it has a decent amount of built-in reporting. For example, WordPress ranks entries by the total number of page views since they were first posted. Unfortunately, the built-in reports are limited to last 7 Days, 30 Days, Quarter, Year, and All Time. This means it’s difficult…