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…
In No Time to Think, Jack Trout claims we’ve become “a world of reactors, not thinkers.” In case you don’t recognize his name, Trout is the author of many marketing classics, including one of my personal favorites ‘The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing‘ which describes the First Mover Advantage. While technology was supposed to make us…
How many strategy management mistakes can you count? 1. Failure to adequately communicate the strategy 2. Failure to explain how the strategy impacts individuals 3. No formal cascade of objectives between high-level strategy (pointy haired boss) and next level down (Dilbert) 4. No way to monitor progress towards achieving objectives Did I miss any?
The recent resurfacing of the BI vs. PM controversy got me thinking about the longstanding confusion between financial, workforce, and IT performance management. When most people hear the term performance management, they think of what I might describe as human capital management. That is clearly different than budgeting, planning, and consolidation. The multiple uses of…
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…
You can always count on Bob Hanson of Sarasota County for a good performance management story. Here’s one that I heard him tell recently: The Parks and Rec department struggled with recruiting and retaining lifeguards for the public pools. People viewed being a lifeguard as only a summer job, not a career, so job satisfaction…
At a recent performance management conference, I attended a talk by the Manager of Strategic Business Planning at the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) who described how they used performance management concepts to dramatically improve the agency. I showed up at the talk with skeptical attitude, as the post office does not have the best reputation…
I often use call centers as my default example when describing how better objectives and metrics can help improve performance. It’s not that performance in call centers is always poor. It’s just that executive management often regards the call center as nothing more than required overhead that burden the bottom line. Call center sometimes unwittingly…
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…
As much as I believe in the concept of organizational alignment, I always find it a bit dismaying that so few other people seem to be blogging about it. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled on this post from a Deloitte Consulting blog called “Corporate Performance Management – The Next Step”. A primary goal of…