Wednesday 26 November 2014

How to Test if Your Strategic Goal Is Really Strategic

When you struggle to find meaningful measures for your strategic goals, there are a few problems that have to be fixed. I've written passionately and prolifically about how weasel words make goals immeasurable. And there's another problem too, called multi-focus. Multi-focus is when we blend several performance results into a single goal statement. And when this happens, you are at great risk of having a goal that isn't truly strategic. Here's why...

Friday 7 November 2014

Dealing With the KPI Terminology Problem

The words frequently used in the performance management field include ‘performance measure’, ‘metric’, ‘performance indicator’, ‘key performance indicator (KPI)’, ‘key result indicator (KRI)’, ‘lead indicator’, ‘lag indicator’, ‘initiative’, ‘strategy’, ‘goal’, ‘objective’, ‘target’, ‘priority’, ‘critical success factor (CSF)’, ‘key result area (KRA)’, ‘strategic theme’, ‘vision’, ‘mission’ – and no doubt many more.

The problem isn’t the sheer volume of words we use. The problem is that we use them differently, with varying and overlapping meanings, and we fail to explain our meanings to each other. For example, here are some variations in definition:

David Parmenter, author of Key Performance Indicators: Developing, Implementing and Using Winning KPIs, defines some of these terms like this:

A key result indicator (KRI) tells us ‘how you have done in a perspective’
A performance indicator (PI) tells us ‘what to do’
A key performance indicator (KPI) is a performance measure that tells us ‘what to do to increase performance dramatically’, as opposed to other types of performance measures