How do you feel when you hear the word 'target' at work? Nervous? Anxious? Excited? Motivated? Competitive? That's the funny thing about targets: we often have an emotional response to them, based on whether or not we believe we can meet them. Is that healthy?

Measure Up reader, Rick, opened up this debate again on my first post about whether gauges and dials can work for KPIs with this claim: "When it comes to KPI’s that are not time related gauges still can give fast insights to performance." And a few other readers agreed. But I still don't....

Data collection is a process, not an event. Thinking about it as a process makes it easier to appreciate all the steps that are involved, who is involved in each step and what resources will be needed to make these steps work well. Use the following checklist as a starting point for thinking through the design of your data collection processes.

I'm often asked how to measure people. Managers, executives and human resource professionals all want to know how to cascade company goals to individuals, and put measures in their performance agreements. It's the toughest question I am ever asked, because my answer isn't what they want to hear.

Many people say they don't have the support to do performance measurement, that their leaders or colleagues don't see the value in it. What you need to do is take a different tack, and hook into what your leaders and colleagues *do* see value in. Make it about fixing a problem, not measuring performance.

We want everyone in the organisation to align their results to the organisation's mission, vision and goals. How do you cascade strategy to create alignment? There are two very different ways.

With these 7 steps, we can make just enough time to measure and improve performance, and ultimately create more time for even better measurement and improvement. (mor...

Certainly one of the biggest objections to measuring performance is the amount of time and effort it takes to do it properly. Executives, managers and staff alike somehow believe that it should be fast and easy, a trivial task they can just 'get out of the way' and go back to their 'real work'. It's because they believe in the same BIG lie.

The following case study is an excerpt from my book, Practical Performance Measurement: Using the PuMP Blueprint for Fast, Easy and Engaging KPIs. It's about how a team in the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States used a simple performance measure to dra...

Jack Phillips' 6 levels of measures for training is an excellent framework. Here is an example of how to use that framework to measure the effectiveness of training, beyond just satisfaction.