For the last 10 years, U.S. News & World Report has published an annual ranking of the top American hospitals in 16 specialties and 20+ metro areas. In the 2010 survey, only 152 of the 4,852 hospitals evaluated performed well enough to rank in any specialty. Of those 152, fourteen of them were given ‘honor role’…
While most people don’t distinguish between goals and objectives in every day conversation, I find that performance management practitioners sometimes use the word goal when they really mean target. This potential confusion between objectives and targets explains why I usually recommend against using the term goal when establishing a standard performance management terminology. From my…
In case you didn’t see it, the U.S. Census Bureau issued a Facts for Features release (note: destination page has been removed) in observance of The Fourth of July 2008. It’s full of unusual holiday-themed factoids you can share at your picnic. My favorite is that the baked beans you eat likely came from North Dakota; the state produced 42%…
I often use a honeycomb as a metaphor for a connected and aligned organization. In Performance Alignment: Cascading Strategy, I defined cascading as a formal method for achieving alignment by explicitly connecting strategy to operations to tactics. When cascading works well, every individual understands how his/her objectives supports the corporate objectives. I frequently get asked how…
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…
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…
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…
As I’ve said before, performance management seems to be invading my personal life. Somehow I looked at Thanksgiving Day through the lens of the logic model: Input Measures Three extended families including 17 adults, 4 kids, and a dog Entirely too much money spent at Whole Foods Countless hours in the kitchen over several days Output Measures…
Much to my own surprise, this week’s blog is about another book. But, unlike last week, it’s not about performance management per se but rather what we can learn about aligning an organization from the sport of baseball. Yup, baseball. The book, Management by Baseball by Jeff Angus, purports to provide “The Official Rules For…