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!

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.

When it comes to cause analysis for performance measures, many people put the cart before the horse. They rush too quickly to analyse their data without first establishing a clear purpose. (more…)...

Stephen Few's arguments about dashboard gauges and dials can be summed up nicely in his own words: they "say little and do so poorly". Agreed. But there's one specific reason that gauges and dials totally suck when it comes to KPIs.

Performance reports that are put together with two font styles – one for the normal text and one for the headings – aren’t just boring and monotonous to the eye. They are also hard to navigate, and make it quite a challenge to find the information you need rapidly and frustration-free.

5 Stars -- My go-to resource for performance report design Okay, I'll admit that I haven't read "Show Me The Numbers" from cover to cover, even though I've owned a copy (a signed copy!) for a few years. But it's not the kind of book that requires this to get the value from it.

5 Stars -- Save millions of dollars by reading this book first... Over my many years as a performance measurement specialist, I've worked with quite a few organisations who built performance dashboards that cost them many hundreds of thousands of dollars to design, tailor, populate and launch, and got very little value from the investment.

4 Stars -- Interpreting data is about the patterns, not the points This is not a book for people looking for the technical detail of data analysis or statistical process control. The pearl in this book is the message that interpreting your data (such as KPIs or performance measures) is about looking at patterns, not at individual points. It's a book that can...

Business Intelligence vendors are all about Big Data, Analytics and agile BI. They have all the answers for how to manage, analyse and report data faster and fancier, to enhance performance management. But are they really performance management experts?

It's getting close to becoming a natural law of performance management that performance reports only know how to grow, not how to shrink. Despite the fact that we all know large reports just won't be read, we still struggle to take information out of them.