Performance management vendors often say adopting their tools must be done all at once, starting at the top of the organization. They argue that, without executive buy-in, a performance management deployment will not have the mandate needed to succeed. Furthermore, the argument continues, without an enterprise data warehouse and reporting tools deployed to every desktop, employees…
Archive | performance management
Focused Organizations
As Balanced Scorecard practitioners know, Kaplan and Norton recommend five principles for strategy focused organizations: translate the strategy to operational terms; align the organization to the strategy; make strategy everyone’s everyday job; make strategy a continual process; and mobilize leadership for change. The City of Charlotte, NC applied these principles to become a Balanced Scorecard…
More Gloom Than Doom
Over at Slate, Zachary Meisel and Jesse Pines have a sensationalist article entitled Waiting Doom that describes how hospitals are killing emergency room patients. They claim Esmin Green’s death was caused by the length of time she waited in the E.R. which they blame on the hospital practice of boarding inpatients. In their words, Despite increasing evidence that crowded E.R.s can…
Riskfriends and Key Risk Indicators
I don’t normally promote other peoples’ blogs and instead comment on their posts or add them to my blogroll. However, I stumbled upon the Riskfriends Weblog which is dedicated “for risk professionals or people who just like risks”. Despite a little sleuthing, I haven’t been able to find out anything about the author other than…
Strategy vs. Planning
For several years, I’ve argued that performance management is more than just budgeting. I’ve also pointed out that the term planning was often misused by software vendors whose products were mostly limited to financial planning (aka budgeting), rather than end-to-end resource allocation and management. And finally, I’ve advocated outcome-based budgeting, rather than activity-based budgeting, so…
Analysts on Strategy Management
Readers of this blog will know I have a deep affinity for a portion of Performance Management that has come to be known as Strategy Management. The most obvious explanation for my passion is the fact I ran a company often cited as pushing the envelope in strategy management. However, I’ve also always felt the…
Measuring Virtual Events
Partially due to corporate sustainability reasons and partly due to old-fashioned cost savings, I’ve been thinking a lot about virtual events lately. The idea behind virtual events is pretty simple – rather than flying thousands of people to a single destination to discuss a series of topics, you have these discussions on-line. While simple in…
Holiday week ramblings
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…
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…