I've been thinking about achievement lately, and why some people do it regularly, and others just struggle. Certainly in my own likelihood to achieve, I see a pattern. And I reckon I see a similar pattern when it comes to how likely my clients are to succeed with performance measurement.

KPIs or performance measures are like clothes: they each have a certain fit, use, purpose and lifetime. But it's usually quite more obvious when to retire a garment than it is to retire a KPI. (...

Colour is a hugely important part of how we design our performance reports and dashboards, particularly the KPI graphs they contain. But there are 5 big mistakes that can destroy the ease and integrity of interpreting the information they contain. Are you making any of them? Let's find out...

When we want people to understand and adopt a new idea, often we rush in, guns blazing, and overwhelm them with too much "how to", too soon. We might be excited about the new idea, but they will be wary. Another band wagon, another fad, another distraction from their "real work". So we need a gentler approach that starts from where they are, not where we are.

Often, new performance measures can't be constructed on existing data. We've not measured them before, so not thought to collect that kind of data before. Sadly, too many important and useful measures are not brought to life because of too much procrastination in gathering the data. Guest author, Jerry, shares a great example of how to handle this problem, from his experience w...

The project team gets together and sets the scope of their KPI project. They outline the steps that need to be followed. They specify how much time to allow for each step. They define the report to be delivered at the end of the project. Then they call for quotes from KPI consultants. And even though this hasn't worked in the past, they wonder why it doesn't work again.

Mission statements really ought to state the ultimate purpose of an organisation - its desired impact on its customers. To know if an organisation is fulfilling its mission (and isn't that important to know?), it needs to be measured. But most mission statements are immeasurable.

Experiments are what scientists use to stop assumptions from limiting how much they learn about the natural world. And we can use them in business to stop our assumptions from limiting how we can elevate performance, and from wasting the resources we invest to do it.

Instead of implementing our change initiatives as long, drawn-out projects, we can run them as a series of iterations. Iterating our way toward a closed performance gap is going to be faster than trying to close that gap with a single big solution.

They will never admit it out loud, or even to themselves, but many leaders are scared of KPIs. And it's for the same reasons most people are scared of KPIs. (more…)