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…
Archive | key performance indicators
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…
Performance Alignment: Cascading Strategy
This week at ASMI’s Balanced Scorecard Masters Conference I gave a talk entitled “Performance Alignment: Cascading Enterprise Strategy Throughout the Organization.” For those of you who may not be familiar with the concept of cascading, it’s a formal method for achieving alignment throughout an organization. Cascading isn’t the only possibility: all employee phone calls, status meetings,…
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…
Show Me The Measures
Although she’s too far away to hear me, I want to give a big shout-out to Stacey Barr from Australia who describes herself as a performance measure specialist. In the Performance Measurement Association Discussion Forum, someone named “Eke, U” asks which parameters they should use to measure the performance of a marine terminal gate. I…
Call Center Metrics
If you’ve heard me give a performance management presentation, you know one of my favorite topics is the pursuit of improved performance in call centers. When I first started using them as my prototypical example several years ago, organizations were in the midst of moving call centers offshore. Less expensive human agents and AI-based electronic agents…
The Performance Power Grid
Because performance management is such a popular term these days, you would expect lots of books being published pushing esoteric new methodologies or describing successful client implementations. I wouldn’t be surprised if I walked into my local bookstore and discovered “Performance Management for Dummies” on the shelf. Oddly, however, this hasn’t happened. There really aren’t…
Dirty KPIs
At a recent performance management workshop, I asked an attendee for an example metric he was using to track performance. The attendee, who worked for a city’s public works department, immediately replied “# of miles of streets cleaned.” Before I could ask any questions, he proudly added “and we cleaned more than 1000 miles last…
Taking Tests
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…
Qualitative KPIs
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…