IN THIS EPISODE: Introduction: The motivation and purpose of this Measure Up podcast. Article: Do Universally Perfect KPIs Exist? Q&A: How to use KPI's for performance improvement not traditional training KPI's Quick Tip: Where KPIs or performance measures fit into your strategic or operational plans.

Accountability isn't the answer to underperformance. Performance can only improve with a relentless focus on finding solutions to the constraints that hold performance back. (more&...

Just as the principle of leverage can apply to many different situations and contexts, from bicycles to business process reengineering, the lessons I'm learning from my running coach, Rina, and other world-class athletes also seem to apply to my work as a Performance Measurement Practitioner. The pursuit of excellence in anything, it seems, is based on a core set of principles.

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.

Measuring performance takes time, effort and money. You have to stop your "real work" to figure out what's worth measuring and set up the data capture and reporting to measure it. So in times like these, when everyone's cutting budgets, downsizing and cancelling non-core projects, should performance measurement go on the backburner too? Imagine that you do stop investing in performance me...

Don't even try and work out how much time, effort, money and opportunity we waste by investing in business strategies that don't truly work. Let's instead talk about how exactly we can go about executing our strategies in a way that tests if they're working, by isolating their effect on our desired performance results.

We all know that what you measure influences people's behaviour. So if you want people to collaborate to improve corporate performance, rather than compete to improve personal performance (often at the expense of corporate performance), measure for collaboration, not competition.

You hear it a lot, don't you? That you should only measure what you can control. Hogwash! The most powerful measures are those that track what you can only influence.

Let's take a closer look at how to measure to expand your influence - and get much more meaningful results.

Are you still measuring performance results annually? And do you wonder why people aren't really getting much value from measuring performance? (more…)

The report design working group sat around the table, sifting through the draft strategic performance report to suggest how to make it more useful. Measure by measure, they chatted and suggested and critiqued and debated:

• “this one would look better if it was a bar chart”
• “yeah, I like the three-dimensional bar charts”
• “we should add another line to this ...