How to create a KPI traffic light dashboard or traffic light report to highlight signals in a clear, valid and constructive way, and avoid the 3 big problems. (more…)

Measure Up reader, Rick, opened up this debate again on my first post about whether gauges and dials can work for KPIs with this claim: "When it comes to KPI’s that are not time related gauges still can give fast insights to performance." And a few other readers agreed. But I still don't....

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...

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?

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.

Following on from Part 1, 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 focusing on the wrong performance measure!

Some legacy habits with how we analyse our data often sneak surreptitiously into our XmR charts, and these habits make our XmR charts incapable of highlighting the real signals in our performance measures.

You won’t find true signals of changes in performance by looking at month-to-month comparisons, or trendlines, or moving averages. The signals you really need to know about, the only signals that you ought to respond to, are revealed through one particular graph only.

Measure Upsubscriber Suzanne asks "How do you set targets using historical data?" It's a great question, because it acknowledges something that most people don't appreciate about target setting.