Lots of my new clients share the same habit (a bad one): they conclude whether performance is getting better or worse by comparing the current month's (or week's or quarter's) performance measure value with last month, or with a target or standard. If this month (or week or quarter) is worse, they go digging for the cause. Trouble is, they don't find that cause.

Using a social process is a very natural way to engage people in measurement, and it works so much better than presentations and meetings. That's the topic of this Harvard ManageMentor video with Stacey Barr.

People can feel very threatened by performance measures, when they feel the measures are judging them personally. That's the topic of this Harvard ManageMentor video with Stacey Barr.

Avoiding business jargon helps to set goals that can be achieved and measured. That's the topic of this Harvard ManageMentor video with Stacey Barr.

Whether you're an executive looking for the right person to lead your corporate performance measure implementation, or you're a strategy or performance professional wanting to position yourself as a performance measurement expert, you need to understand what mastery in the field of performance measurement looks like. You need to be able to recognise someone who possesses this mastery.

When people resist performance targets for their measures, the most common reason is, “Yeah, but we don’t have enough staff to make that happen!” (more…...

We all collect volumes of qualitative data - the data that made up from words and not numbers - as part of doing business. Qualitative data comes from open-ended questions on customer surveys, comment fields on forms, and other blocks of text we capture in our database systems. We collect it, but do we make the ...

Do your customers fall asleep before they get to the end of your feedback survey? Do they rush through without thinking carefully about your questions, because it's just taking too long? Do you collect loads of feedback on a dozen or more questions, but fail to put it to good use? You definitely need a bit of 'survey zen'.

[4 stars] I read the first couple of pages of this free e-book and started to feel excited that finally a dashboard software vendor had come to understand what good performance measurement involved. The more I read, the more curious I became: so many of the ideas were almost identical to the ideas and techniques in PuMP. Then I learned that the author, Clive Keyte of Intrafocus.com, had been...

How to create a KPI traffic light dashboard or traffic light report to highlight signals in a clear, valid and constructive way, and avoid the 3 big problems. (more…)