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…
Tag Archives | metrics
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…
Timing of Blogs
One of the advantages of using WordPress for my blog is it has a decent amount of built-in reporting. For example, WordPress ranks entries by the total number of page views since they were first posted. Unfortunately, the built-in reports are limited to last 7 Days, 30 Days, Quarter, Year, and All Time. This means it’s difficult…
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…
The Risk of Spreadsheets
Unless you were trapped on a desert island over the last few months, it’s unlikely that you missed the Société Générale scandal and the resulting teeth-gnashing about the need for stricter controls and oversight in the financial services industry. While I’m all for better access and process controls leading to improved segregation of duties, I…
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…
Understanding Quality in Performance Management
In my experience, most people don’t really understand how to track quality in a performance management system. Over the years, I’ve seen the strategic objectives and KPIs for dozens of organizations; large and small, commercial and public sector, US and International. I’ve previously claimed customer satisfaction is one of the most used – and least…
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…
Cascading Satisfaction
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…