Problem: You have to sit down with your team, and work out your performance measures. You want it to be collaborative and fruitful, but you're dreading it because in the past it's generally been cumbersome and futile. Solution: You have to do something different.

We put so much effort into developing our performance measures (aka KPIs). It seems only natural to want them to be relevant and useful for a long time, to get the return on the effort we invested into their conception and implementation. So what is the ideal lifespan of a performance measure?

Mark Hocknell, PuMP Consultant, has worked in the area of performance measurement for about 10 years now. Prior to that, Mark's 15 years in senior management gave him plenty of experience as a user of measures, metrics, statistics, data, counts and numbers of all kinds. As business leaders, we know it's useful to inform our decis...

Guest author Martin Klubeck, author of Metrics: How to Improve Key Business Results, suggests that seeking quick-fix KPIs means you're not really ready for proper KPIs.

Imagine there is a universe of measures. It's the all-encompassing collection of anything an organisation happens to measure. Navigating through the universe of measures, to decide how, when, why and whether to use each of them, is a massively overwhelming task.

Often in measuring performance we ask a question too soon: so, how do we measure that? As soon as you answer that question, you're tumbling down the rabbit-hole toward a world of silliness and subjectivity. The characters you're surrounded by are pretentious goals claiming to be too complex to measure, and confused goals draped in trivial counts and milestones.

Guest author Jerry Stigall, Director of Organizational Development at Denver Regional Council of Governments, has written a guest post on what to say when they say "we're not measuring that because it's outside our control".

There isn't a single and universally applied definition of the word 'goal'. And so many different things pretend to be goals. One messy consequence is that when we try to measure our goals, we can end up with very trivial and useless measures.

Whether or not you're using the PuMP Measure Design technique to design your measures, you'll do yourself a favour to note these common traps people fall into when designing their measures. Avoid them!

Hoarding is a disorder where people have incredible difficulty parting with possessions, or an incredible compulsion to acquire more possessions. They, and everyone close to them, drown in clutter. Are you a hoarder... of KPIs?