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…)

Donald Trump Jr., on 21st Century TV, interviewed my friends Howard Rohm (CEO) and Gail Stout Perry (Vice-President of Strategic Solutions) from the Balanced Scorecard Institute. During the interview they shared some great tips about strategy design, specifically with their approach to the Balanced Scorecard. They discussed:

• the problems of the C-Suite designing goals that fail ...

If your KPIs suck, even though you've long wished for better ones, it's likely that something is holding you back. That 'something' could be a very good reason, or it could simply be an excuse that you're mistaking for a reason.

When you struggle to find meaningful measures for your strategic goals, there are a few problems that have to be fixed. I've written passionately and prolifically about how weasel words make goals immeasurable. And there's another problem too, called multi-focus. Multi-focus is when we blend several performance results into a single goal statem...

I've written about two very powerful graphs to use on performance dashboards, or in performance reports that need to be concise: my version of Stephen Few's bullet graph, and my version of Edward Tufte's sparkline (my version is called a smartline). Is one better than the other?

Most managers and executives will never have truly transformational performance measures because they aren't prepared to pay the price for them. The price isn't a consultant's invoice, or a training registration fee, or a swanky dashboard. The price is discomfort. And for many, it would seem, this price is simply too high.

The world loves Stephen Few's bullet graph. It's small, concise and speaks volumes about the comparison between current performance and targeted performance. It's a prodigious improvement on dashboard gauges. In constructing a bullet graph, however, you have options. Here's the one I recommend...

Particularly in larger organisations, not much organisation-wide change can happen (and stick) without executive support. Implementing a new performance measurement approach is particularly hard without executive support. But there is a way to win executive support for KPIs. A way that consistently works...

If you're problem isn't having too few performance measures, then most certainly it's having too many. We don't like to let go of our performance measures because we might just need them someday, and it took a lot of effort to get them in the first place. These aren't good reasons for keeping them, and doing so will cause us more harm than good.