We love to classify types of KPIs. Lead versus Lag. Input versus output. Strategic versus operational. What's the most useful way to do it? (more…)

Performance measures are mostly focused on improving performance in what we already do. But can this business-as-usual focus on existing performance measures sabotage necessary change?

It can be a struggle to align everyone to organisational outcomes, or the corporate strategy. But the solution is not to make up dubious linkages. (more…)

The rift between the day-to-day operations and strategic goals can sometimes be too wide for managers to have any KPI buy-in at all. (more…)

The tick-and-flick approach to reviewing KPIs, one at a time down the scorecard, won't ever reveal the insights about how to truly improve performance.

It's often easier to cascade the corporate strategy to customer-facing functions than it is to cascade strategy to support functions. That's because we make a common mistake that's based on a false assumption about how support functions align to strategy.

Many organisations have a KPI mess: too many useless measures, not enough of the right measures, and little idea of exactly how many measures altogether. This mess is an unnecessary cost, and it’s not that hard to clean it up.

Strategy execution more often than not feels like work, rather than true execution. Sometimes it feels like rework, when we keep redesigning it. Other times it feels like guesswork, implementing without really knowing if it’s working. And then there are times when it’s just plain hard work to get anything to happen. What we want is smooth execution to take the place of the work.

Sometimes hard-to-measure strategic goals can be fixed in the measurement process (like how Step 2 of PuMP fixes the weasel word problem). But strategy can be hard to measure due to poor logic and poor structure, and this can't be fixed in the measurement process. We have to go back and rework the planning process to make the strategy sensible.

KPIs or performance measures are like clothes: they each have a certain fit, use, purpose and lifetime. But it's usually quite more obvious when to retire a garment than it is to retire a KPI. (...