Many of us struggle to get the support and buy-in to establish a proper and deliberate performance measurement methodology in our organisations. The timing just isn't right, or you just don't have a compelling enough case yet. One way to get started is to practice your own advice, personally.

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?

Robert D. Behn is a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a passionate advocate for public sector performance. His regular Performance Leadership Report is always succinct and salient. His definition of performance management, versus performance measurement, clearly puts the responsibility on leade...

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.

In NASCAR racing, you might be forgiven for thinking that a speedometer is a very important gauge for the driver. After all, racing is about speed, right? And speed should therefore be measured. But ironically, NASCAR drivers don't use a speedometer at all.

Guest author Martin Klubeck, author of Metrics: How to Improve Key Business Results, reminds us just how easy it is to fall into the trap of making our measures the end goal, and why we must make sure we stay connected with our intended results.

One of my performance measures is Measure Up Unsubscribe Rate, the proportion of readers who unsubscribe from this newsletter. Sometimes it's what I write about that makes them unsubscribe. And that can make the Measure Up Unsubscribe Rate will spike up. Should I worry about this?

One mistake organisations make in performance measurement is to not have a real KPI methodology. They treat measuring performance as an ad hoc activity or event. But when you do adopt a performance measurement methodology, another mistake is to do too ...

Call centres and technical support and help desk managers love to measure their staff. The belief is that when they can measure someone, they will have more control over the performance of the person or the work. But the control is an illusion...

The best and most meaningful performance measure in the world can be rendered utterly useless if no one is clear about who should interpret and use it. (more…)