One objection to measuring performance with KPIs is that we don't need them; we can already see what's going on by walking around, by our past experience, by our wise intuition, by what people complain about. But our human limitations make these observations inherently biased.

A post from Guest author Louise Watson, licensed PuMP Consultant from Adura Strategy. I'm working in the Middle East with two Canadian companies with operations in Qatar, and I have been thinking about how the work I am doing with them has really put a spotlight on how the PuMP® Performance Measurement Blueprint can ...

Most organisations do measure performance, even if it's only financial results. But the world over, there is a rapidly growing demand for better quality performance measures of non-financial results. Despite the demand, few organisations are doing it well. The biggest reason is their failure to invest appropriately in their performance measurement approach.

Are you holding back from better performance measurement because your leaders aren't open to it, or because your colleagues are too busy, or because your organisation isn't ready for it? What's really holding you back is YOU and not them...

We want people to be engaged - or have buy-in - to performance measures so they will support the implementation of those measures, and use them to improve performance. But dragging them to KPI meetings and presentations, and loading them with lists of measures to review, rarely gets true buy-in. Solution: the Measure Gallery.

If your KPIs suck, even though you've long wished for better ones, it's likely that something is holding you back. That 'something' could be a very good reason, or it could simply be an excuse that you're mistaking for a reason.

Particularly in larger organisations, not much organisation-wide change can happen (and stick) without executive support. Implementing a new performance measurement approach is particularly hard without executive support. But there is a way to win executive support for KPIs. A way that consistently works...

Many people say they don't have the support to do performance measurement, that their leaders or colleagues don't see the value in it. What you need to do is take a different tack, and hook into what your leaders and colleagues *do* see value in. Make it about fixing a problem, not measuring performance.

Certainly one of the biggest objections to measuring performance is the amount of time and effort it takes to do it properly. Executives, managers and staff alike somehow believe that it should be fast and easy, a trivial task they can just 'get out of the way' and go back to their 'real work'. It's because they believe in the same BIG lie.

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...