One of the trickiest KPIs to analyse, interpret and use are those that have a seasonal or cyclical pattern. Can you make these KPIs reveal their insights about how to improve performance, without getting drowned out in the seasonal variation? Yes you can!

Statistical thinking is not so much about having knowledge of and being able to apply statistical techniques. It’s NOT about knowing how to perform a regression analysis or knowing the formula for putting a trend line through a time series.

Andy M. asks: "Many of my colleagues work in what is often called a "considerative" area. They don't produce things. They assess evidence, form judgements, give opinions. They say the work is too complicated to be measured. I keep saying "If you can't measure it how do you know you're providing quality?" How can I convince them?"

Unless your performance reports are focused on answering three critical questions, they're likely to bore you sleep, lead you astray, or confuse the begeesus out of you. (more…)

Do you have these 3 essential things on your KPI graphs in your dashboard? If not, you're misinterpreting your performance measure signals. (more…)

Most of us know we need feedback from customers in order to make service delivery and product design more in line with customer needs and expectations. But too often, our customer surveys fail to get truly focused and actionable data.

You depend on the quality of data and information to provide a stable foundation for your decision making. Decision making often involves responding to something, so you need your data to validly describe what you are responding to so that you choose the right responses. Whether your data is quantitative (based on numbers) or qualitative (based on perceptions), it's integrity depends on 5 wi...

Most performance measures or KPIs tell you what happened. But if we're really going to manage company or organisational performance, we need to know something about what's going to happen. And that's what lead indicators do. They are a special breed of performance measure or KPI because they have predictive power.

It's an emotional thing, performance reporting and dashboarding. Executives give up the precious little time they have for their families to instead paw through piles of strategic reports often more than an inch thick (or several drilldowns deep). Or they leave the pile of reports on their desk, or give their performance dashboard a quick glance, but then make decisions from their guts inst...

How fast you can get from "We need some measures," to "Wow, what a cool performance report!", the better. (more…)