Performance Measurement

A problem many of us have is too many measures and, consequently, too much to improve. We need to prioritise, but we somehow don't do it well enough. Here's a method to focus on what really matters most, that has over 116 years of proof that it works...

Performance measures aren’t doing their best work when you treat them as a tick-and-flick monitoring tool. They are only giving you one angle on performance. Often the insights you need will come from a richer story that needs more characters to give a fuller picture.

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.

Measurement and analysis gives companies the ability to understand their customers and markets better, improve internal efficiencies, and much more. Having access to more data usually means better insights. However, are companies like Facebook overstepping the mark by exploiting our private information?

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.

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.