Although I don’t get to do it nearly as much as I used to, one of my favorite parts of my job is helping organizations avoid measurement missteps. My focus is on strategy articulation, not strategy formulation. While other consultants focus on helping organizations figure out where they should go, I use performance management techniques to make…
It seems like every few months someone tries to claim performance management is bad for organizations. The latest one comes from Phil Dourado who writes, “Target-based systems distort everything and most people’s behaviour.” Phil bases his indictment of performance management on several stories about the UK’s National Health Service in which “brilliant, dedicated people [are] pushed…
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…
After my posting on call centers, I received an email from a reader submitting his own recent experience with a call center. The story is so funny – and such a classic example of lack of alignment – that, with the reader’s permission, I decided to share it with you. I edited the email for…
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…
Based on my blog statistics, one of the most popular performance management articles I’ve ever written is Dirty KPIs: an article is about the challenges of using a metric based on activity rather than outcome. During one of my workshops, I recommended that an attendee use the outcome measure ‘% reduction in complaints about street…
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…