Lots of organisations are paralysed part-way through their KPI implementation. They started with all good intentions, but now they have dead and dying measures trapped in the KPI column of their strategic and operational plans, never to see the light of day.

Guest author Terry Fagg, a local government manager, writes a short marketing brief from a fictional consulting firm called Weasel Words Inc. Be warned: this is bad advice!! (more…)

Modern-day wisdom says that nothing changes without leadership from the top. And that's the excuse many give for not pursuing the changes they know are desperately needed. Performance measurement is one of these changes that is desperately needed, but rarely driven from the top.

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!

What's the real role of performance measurement? To serve the bureaucratic machine? To keep an eye on employees? To hold executives accountable? Does the role change depending on whose measuring and what they're measuring? I don't believe so. I believe that performance measurement's role is universally comprised of three specific things.

If you don't have time to measure what matters, poor performance will continue to use up more of your time. Here are 5 strategies to give a higher priority to measurement.

We want people to be engaged - or have buy-in - to performance measures so they will support the implementation of those measures, and use them to improve performance. But dragging them to KPI meetings and presentations, and loading them with lists of measures to review, rarely gets true buy-in. Solution: the Measure Gallery.

Measure Up reader, Kenneth, works in a hospital and has this measurement challenge: "Different people want to follow up on different things. The nurses, for example, think it is crucial to follow up on how many phone calls they answer. I reckon it is because they want evidence to show management how they spend their time at work. But I do not think this is a critical KPI or success fac...

As a thought leader with a message that I desperately want to share with the world, reaching out to as many people as possible is critical to success. No point shouting from the rooftops "hey everyone, measure what matters!" because few people pay attention to rooftops, actually. I have to find other ways to reach out, but I've been failing...

Measure Up reader, Srini, asks this question: "Is there a set of KPIs limited to 3-6 which can help ALL businesses and non-profits?" Most people ask questions like this when they're just getting started with measuring performance. So while you take the time to also learn the process of designing the best measures for your organisation, here's my sug...