It happens all the time: we inadvertently measure the same thing, more than once in our businesses and end up with two or more different versions of the truth.

It's an emotional thing, performance reporting and dashboarding. Executives give up the precious little time they have for their families to instead paw through piles of strategic reports often more than an inch thick (or several drilldowns deep). Or they leave the pile of reports on their desk, or give their performance dashboard a quick glance, but then make decisions from their guts inst...

We almost all do it: hang on to performance measures that we really don't need. Believe me, measuring what doesn't matter does more harm than good! When you're measuring what doesn't matter, you're using up resources better spent analysing and improving, rather than reporting. And people's focus will be fractured by the sheer volume of data that's put in front of them.

Measuring performance takes time, effort and money. You have to stop your "real work" to figure out what's worth measuring and set up the data capture and reporting to measure it. So in times like these, when everyone's cutting budgets, downsizing and cancelling non-core projects, should performance measurement go on the backburner too? Imagine that you do stop investing in performance me...

M William (Bill) Sermons, Director of the Alliance’s Homelessness Research Institute, specializes in cross-disciplinary research and program evaluation. As Director of the Homelessness Research Institute, he is responsible for advancing the Institute’s aim of building and disseminating knowledge that informs policy and practice.

Don't even try and work out how much time, effort, money and opportunity we waste by investing in business strategies that don't truly work. Let's instead talk about how exactly we can go about executing our strategies in a way that tests if they're working, by isolating their effect on our desired performance results.

There are some very good reasons why managers and executives DO give time and resources to performance measurement. And understanding these reasons is your key to reframing the value that performance measurement can have for the manager or executive who so far has no interest in supporting it.

One of the hardest challenges in implementing better KPIs and measurement into an organisation is engaging the leaders and managers to care about measuring what matters.

Most performance measurement systems are never fully brought to life because of poor performance culture change management. The following prompts are a framework to design your performance measurement system, acknowledging that it is a change process, just like any other initiative your organisation faces in the spirit of continuous improvement and adaptation.

2 Stars -- It's not even half of the potential of the CPO The true potential of the Chief Performance Officer role is to be the leader of an organisation's or company's performance culture. In other words, the CPO leads people from top to bottom in the organisation to adopt evidence-based decision making, to measure what matters, and to use measures to guide the improvement ...