Following on from Part 1, another of the legacy habits that can sneak surreptitiously into our XmR charts and make them incapable of highlighting the real signals in our performance measures, is focusing on the wrong performance measure!

Some legacy habits with how we analyse our data often sneak surreptitiously into our XmR charts, and these habits make our XmR charts incapable of highlighting the real signals in our performance measures.

You won’t find true signals of changes in performance by looking at month-to-month comparisons, or trendlines, or moving averages. The signals you really need to know about, the only signals that you ought to respond to, are revealed through one particular graph only.

Guest Post by Bryan Hansen While working through the implications of an assignment I was given by my employer to awaken a deeply hibernating employee review process, I began to experience a bit of a gestalt and used this mind map to help me keep all the plates spinning while I continued to follow some important rabbit trails.

I used to think that performance measurement was about the techniques of selecting, collecting, analysing, presenting, and interpreting data to inform decision making. It’s true that technique is an important part of the process, but I’ve been excited to learn that performance measurement is mostly about the people.

If we want to help people, like our colleagues and leaders, to understand why performance measurement needs to be done better, we need to engage them in the right kind of dialogue.

This checklist of 5 basic KPI formulas, with examples for each one, will help you decide the best way to calculate your KPIs. (more…)

When it comes to cause analysis for performance measures, many people put the cart before the horse. They rush too quickly to analyse their data without first establishing a clear purpose. (more…)...

Evaluation is about looking for improvement. But so is performance measurement. So why don't we call them the same thing? Well, it's because they're different.

Quite a few people still seem to think that performance measures are only needed at the end of the planning cycle, to check and see whether the goals were achieved and the strategic initiatives implemented.