A post from Guest author Louise Watson, licensed PuMP Consultant from Adura Strategy. I'm working in the Middle East with two Canadian companies with operations in Qatar, and I have been thinking about how the work I am doing with them has really put a spotlight on how the PuMP® Performance Measurement Blueprint can ...

Most organisations do measure performance, even if it's only financial results. But the world over, there is a rapidly growing demand for better quality performance measures of non-financial results. Despite the demand, few organisations are doing it well. The biggest reason is their failure to invest appropriately in their performance measurement approach.

To make useful progress with KPIs, we have to get over our obsession with getting it right, doing it perfectly and waiting for all all the planets line up before we get started. We’d be waiting for ever. And one way to get over these types of procrastination is simply to start where the energy is.

Forget all the cliches about why we measure performance. 'You can't manage what you don't measure.' 'What you measure is what you get.' Why we measure performance is much more profound and fundamental.

Evidence-based leadership is not about how to lead. It's about what to give your attention to as you lead, and what you're leading your organisation to. It's not about how to communicate or inspire or direct or engage. It's about how to use all these attributes to lead your organisation to high-performance.

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...

The instrument you use to collect data for your performance measures or KPIs really needs to be capable of recording the data you really need. Forms and questionnaires are probably the most common instruments used in business to collect data, but few users realise that there is science and skill at the foundation of every useful form and questionnaire.

Project performance measurement isn't just on-time and on-budget. Here are 7 ways for how to measure project performance meaningfully. (more…)