Work stress, projects behind schedule, and low productivity are all symptoms of an underlying problem with workload variability. You'll feel it as some months you can't get the important things even started, and other months you're pushing productivity past the redline. The solution lies in measuring the variation in workload, and not just the amount of it.

Do your customers fall asleep before they get to the end of your feedback survey? Do they rush through without thinking carefully about your questions, because it's just taking too long? Do you collect loads of feedback on a dozen or more questions, but fail to put it to good use? You definitely need a bit of 'survey zen'.

The following case study is an excerpt from my book, Practical Performance Measurement: Using the PuMP Blueprint for Fast, Easy and Engaging KPIs. It's about how a team in the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States used a simple performance measure to dra...

Jack Phillips' 6 levels of measures for training is an excellent framework. Here is an example of how to use that framework to measure the effectiveness of training, beyond just satisfaction.

If you're stuck for what to start measuring, there is one category of performance that is important to every organisation or business in every sector, industry and country. It's waste, in all its forms. Which of the four categories matters most to you right now?

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...

If you don't take care in naming your performance measures, you end up with problems like different measures having the same name, the same measure having different names, and people getting confused about what the measure is about. That's messy. So don't take naming your measures too lightly.

Staff Turnover might be easy and familiar to measure, but it is a very poor way to measure employee engagement. Here are five reasons why. (more…)

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.