MODERN MANAGEMENT
Capability. Customer Loyalty.
They are all weasely, because
they can mean different things to
different people. We’ll get better
measures when we write them in
plain English that avoids ambiguity
and the possibility of multiple
interpretations.
Trap #3: Not writing
quantitative measures.
Performance measures are
quantitative things. They must
be specifically articulated in
quantitative terms. This means
that when we write a measure,
we need to follow a two-part
quantification recipe. Part 1 is
the statistic, such as percentage,
average, sum, or count. Part 2
is the data item our measure
is built from, such as customer
satisfaction rating, employee
injuries, hours of rework, or
delivery cycle time.
Trap #4: Prioritising
feasibility over relevance.
“We don’t have any data for
that.” That’s a common reason
for not choosing measures. But
often these measures are very
powerful evidence of the result
to be measured. If we limit our
measures to the data we have,
we’ll never have the data we
need. Yes, we do need to take
feasibility of data collection into
account, but relevance trumps
feasibility.
Better measures mean better
decisions, and that’s how
business performance improves.
And better measures will only
come from a deliberate measure
design process that makes
sure our measures are the best
evidence of our business’ actual
performance.
Trap #5: Writing vague
measure names and
descriptions.
Vague measure names and limp
descriptions (or no descriptions
at all) are a terrible starting point
for implementing new measures.
The ambiguity wastes time and
effort later on, when no-one has
any clue what exactly to report.
Customer Satisfaction might be
a good name for a measure, but
it’s not a measure without a clear
description: The average rating
that customers, who were active
in the last month, gave us on a
scale of 1 to 10 for how satisfied
they were with our overall service
delivery to them in the past
month.
Stacey Barr is one of the world’s leading
specialists in business performance
measurement and KPIs. She is known
for her practicality in solving the most
common struggles with measuring
what matters. Her book ‘Practical
Performance Measurement: Using
the PuMP Blueprint for Fast, Easy,
and Engaging KPIs’ is available at all
amazon online stores. For more, visit
www.staceybarr.com.
July 2016
ModernBusiness
63