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?

Work stress, projects behind schedule, and low productivity are all symptoms of an underlying problem with workload variability. You'll feel it as some months you can't get the important things even started, and other months you're pushing productivity past the redline. The solution lies in measuring the variation in workload, and not just the amount of it.

When people resist performance targets for their measures, the most common reason is, “Yeah, but we don’t have enough staff to make that happen!” (more…...

How do you feel when you hear the word 'target' at work? Nervous? Anxious? Excited? Motivated? Competitive? That's the funny thing about targets: we often have an emotional response to them, based on whether or not we believe we can meet them. Is that healthy?

You'll get better quality measures when you start to deliberately choose the best way to quantify your measures. It's too easy to default to counts and percentages. Instead, learn these five basic quantification formulae so you can make better choices in the future.

Some people love targets and many people hate them. They will avoid locking in targets, they will set them low enough to be within their known capability, and they will make excuses about why they don't reach them. Hardly the kind of behaviour that drives performance improvement.

A typical way to set targets is to calculate a target for the year, and then apportion it to each month in that year. The idea is to keep everyone focused on achieving the target, so increase the likelihood the annual target will be met. But it doesn't work. ...

"You'll get square eyes!" my mother used to warn me when I was a child, and she thought I was watching too much TV. It's not true, but it is true that what we look at most does certainly influence our sight. How is our sight influenced by looking at short-term targets?

In performance improvement, a few important terms are often confused or misused. So, exactly what are benchmarks, baselines, targets and standards? (more…)

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.