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…
Tag Archives | key performance indicators
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…
Measuring (Lack of) CRM Usage
One of the most common complaints about customer relationship management (CRM) systems is that individual reps don’t use them. This isn’t very surprising to me, as many CRM deployments are designed to give visibility to management or to streamline the ops person’s ability to forecast, rather than to add value to the individual rep. Organizations try…
Bad KPIs, bad behavior
I received the following email about my Love/Hate Boss post: Your recent comments about relationship between boss styles and KPIs really hit home but in a different context than you described. My boss is currently developing KPIs for me and my team to judge our 2008 performance and he asked me for input. When workers…
Blogging Performance
How’s your blog doing? That’s a question I get frequently and I fumble for a good answer. Normally I mention that my readership seems to increase every month and leave it at that. But the question – and my fumbled answer – are a constant reminder I’ve never established any objectives for this blog. As such, I…
Dash-bored
If you weren’t convinced that dashboards have become over-hyped, these two Dilbert strips that appeared last week should be the final straw: (Click twice to enlarge the comics) The intellectual side of me would like to defend our profession and chalk these up as simply cartoons designed to elicit a laugh. Unfortunately, they are…
Multiple Targets
If you’re a performance management practitioner, you already know metrics should have both an actual and a target value. Actual is the current value of a metric while target is the value you would like it to be. (NB: I strongly prefer using the word target instead of goal because the latter can easily be…