Often, new performance measures can't be constructed on existing data. We've not measured them before, so not thought to collect that kind of data before. Sadly, too many important and useful measures are not brought to life because of too much procrastination in gathering the data. Guest author, Jerry, shares a great example of how to handle this problem, from his experience w...

The only way we can get performance to improve is to have some quantifiable influence over it. But some areas of performance are so chaotic that any improvement we try to make is swallowed up by the chaos, and we can't quantify (or even see) the change we've made.

My interview with Donald Wheeler is a very practical exploration of how we can better interpret signals from our performance measures and KPI's. (more&hel...

Don't default to familiar or traditional KPI monitoring methods; focus first on the two comparisons that get the most insight from our performance measures. (more…)

We all collect volumes of qualitative data - the data that made up from words and not numbers - as part of doing business. Qualitative data comes from open-ended questions on customer surveys, comment fields on forms, and other blocks of text we capture in our database systems. We collect it, but do we make the ...

We slice, we dice, we tabulate, we chart, we dashboard and then we draw conclusions. But how often have we drawn diabolically incorrect conclusions because we have violated the two basic principles of understanding our measures?

4 Stars -- Practical performance measurement wisdom from the trenches... Marty Klubeck's fresh and practical perspective on how to measure what matters fills a gap in the performance measurement literature. It's the most important gap to fill: the how-to and step-by-step details of how to decide what is important to measure, what the measures should be, and how to use those me...

Triangulation is a method of locating a point using information about its relationship to two or three known points. It's applied in social sciences by using two or more methods to check the results of a study. Applying this concept to performance management, we can use multiple measures to triangulate our goals, lessening the...

Performance measures aren’t doing their best work when you treat them as a tick-and-flick monitoring tool. They are only giving you one angle on performance. Often the insights you need will come from a richer story that needs more characters to give a fuller picture.

Following on from Parts 1 and 2, another of the legacy habits that can sneak surreptitiously into our XmR charts and make them incapable of highlighting the real signals in our performance measures, is relying too much on our eyes and not enough on the rules for detecting signals.