If you go looking for KPIs or performance measures, you'll often come across articles that debate the pros and cons of various measures, or that compare the merits of one measure to another. But don't be fooled: the search for the measures that are best for everyone is a search in futility.

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...

One of the worst problems that makes strategic outcomes hard to measure is the excessive use of 'weasely' language. And you'll know what I mean if your strategy is full of words like efficiency, productivity, sustainability, or even performance outcomes.

The Balanced Scorecard was the turning point for measuring non-financial performance. But that doesn't mean it's a KPI performance measurement tool. (more…)

Milestones are commonly used as KPIs or performance measures. But they are not performance measures because they fail a few essential tests of what makes a meaningful performance measure.

It happens all the time: we inadvertently measure the same thing, more than once in our businesses and end up with two or more different versions of the truth.

We almost all do it: hang on to performance measures that we really don't need. Believe me, measuring what doesn't matter does more harm than good! When you're measuring what doesn't matter, you're using up resources better spent analysing and improving, rather than reporting. And people's focus will be fractured by the sheer volume of data that's put in front of them.

5 Stars -- For all manner of "How do I measure this?" challenges Some of the best reflections I took from Doug's book, How to Measure Anything, are these:

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.

As practitioners in the Land of Performance Measurement, we have our own version of Dorothy's 'Lions and tigers and bears' in the Land of Oz. We have activities, outputs and outcomes. Creatures that seem so much more frightening than they truly are, and mostly because we don't really understand whether and how we are supposed to measure them.