PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT

PROCESS – PuMP®*

Are you aware that almost everyone dealing with measures, including executives, managers, strategy and performance professionals, project managers, business analysts, data scientists have similar struggles to measure business performance meaningfully?

Those struggles are:

HOW TO MEASURE WHAT MATTERS -PDF
Find a shared understanding of what measures or KPIs actually are, and why we need them
Easily find meaningful, results-oriented performance measures (KPIs, metrics)
Get true buy-in to performance measurement
Strongly align performance measures to strategy
Measure those seemingly-immeasurable intangible goals
Report performance measures to make the right actions obvious
Use performance measures to drive improvement and reach targets

There are some very common practices in how people develop KPIs and performance measures. The reason for having such struggles is bad KPI habits that became common practice of which we are usually not aware of!

Which of the below are familiar to you?

Brainstorming measures, or looking for off-the-shelf or ‘best practice’ measures (KPIs)
Failing to involve people in the right ways to develop and use measures, which creates even more disinterest, cynicism and fear
Measuring activity rather than results (and using milestones rather than true measures of performance)
Writing objectives and goals with vague, weasely words like effective, efficient, sustainable, reliable, quality, and so on
Filling reports with trivial gauges and dials, gaudy and complex graphs, and stupifying tables and commentary
Interpreting performance by comparing this month to last month, and knee-jerk reacting to any and every change in the data

These are all bad KPI habits! They became common practice with the lack of a proper and deliberately designed measurement methodology. Their becoming a common practice unfortunately does not mean they are the right practice.

PuMP® (Performance Measurement Process-Up to you) is a performance measurement process with 8 practical steps, which is designed to replace all of the bad KPI habits with techniques that actually work. It is a measurement methodology that helps you clarify your priorities and focus, execute and monitor your strategy in a meaningful way by designing your measures, bring them into life and use them to achieve permanent performance improvements.

The benefits of implementing PuMP® would be:

Make your strategy measurable and easier to communicate and cascade
Select and design performance measures that are far more meaningful than brainstorming or benchmarking ever can produce
Get buy-in from staff and stakeholders to enthusiastically own performance measurement and improvement
Bring your measures to life in a consistent way, using the right data and with the right ownership
Design insightful and actionable reports and dashboards that focus discussion on improvement
Clearly see the real signals from your measures about whether performance is improving or not
Convincingly hit your performance targets, and make measurement about transformation, not about blame or covering your bum!

Ultimately, when you implement PuMP®, you achieve your goals sooner and with less effort, and in a way that’s engaging and practical. PuMP® changes beliefs, attitudes, knowledge and skills about measuring performance. And that’s how to create a high-performance culture.

* Taken and modified from Stacey Barr’s web page (www.staceybarr.com/about/pump/)