One of the things that separates organisations who race ahead with their performance measurement from those that spin their wheels is the cross-organisational Measures Team.
A Measures Team is a group of representatives from the various groups within your organisation, who are the leaders or facilitators or coordinators of performance measurement in their group.
The Measures Team is usually led by someone in a corporate role, such as the Chief Performance Officer or someone in the corporate strategy, planning and performance group. And their mission is unify, coordinate, support and learn how performance measurement happens across the entire organisation.
This group is essentially a mastermind. And with the power of them all working together, you can accelerate the progress your organisation makes in measuring what matters, and get that much sought after buy-in right across the organisation too.
But for a Measures Team to work well, there are a range of conditions that you ought to strive for in setting up and managing them:
CONDITION 1: Include volunteers only. You want your Measures Team to be positive and enthused and engaged and not hold up progress with their cynicism and procrastination. I've worked with Measures Teams where some members were nominated by managers and because their heart wasn't in it, everyone else had to make up for it with extra work, and wider buy-in suffered greatly.
CONDITION 2: Make sure Measures Team members' managers support their involvement. Talk with managers to make it clear what the commitment involves and get their promise that this time will be freed in their Measures Team representatives' schedules. You can't "bolt on" performance measurement - it has to be a priority higher than something else, which they will stop doing to make the time.
CONDITION 3: Meet with your Measures Team regularly. Weekly is ideal but meet certainly no less than monthly, so you can keep the momentum and team dynamics very strong. With some of the Measures Teams I've coached, we've had two teleconferences and one live meeting each month.
CONDITION 4: Focus your Measures Team meetings on supporting each other. That's the mastermind concept: sharing insights, learning from each other, solving problems together. We often spend time with a status check, followed by an open dialogue for everyone to reflect, then get to action planning to solve any problems or bring any great ideas to fruition.
CONDITION 5: Encourage your Measure Team members to collaborate with each other. They will learn a lot and help to bridge those gaps between the organisational silos when they can support each other during measure workshops or meetings within their own divisions. It will accelerate their learning, their progress and build a stronger Measures Team too.
CONDITION 6: Have a single, organisational approach to performance measurement. It's so important that everyone in your Measures Team is pursuing the same vision, the same way. You'll move faster and waste a LOT less time with debates about how to choose a measure or what to include in a performance report.
CONDITION 7: Train your Measures Team members in performance measurement. Virtually all the Measures Teams I've worked with have started out attending my Performance Measure Blueprint Workshop, and some even continue their development through my more advanced PuMP Facilitator MasterMind program. But the point is, don't assume they have the performance measurement knowledge they need. Experience shows this is a bad assumption to make.
CONDITION 8: Train your Measures Team members in group facilitation. The people in your Measures Team will be spending most of their time helping their colleagues in their own group to develop and use better measures. They'll do this more confidently, more easily and more quickly if they know how to facilitate group dynamics and group processes. And they'll get much more buy-in that way too.
CONDITION 9: Celebrate your successes, including failures you've learned from. Your Measures Team, like any other group of people in your organisation, will find their motivation wane unless they get some intrinsic value from being a part of performance measurement. So design celebration into your charter.
CONDITION 10: Use a plan for performance measurement implementation for your organisation. Don't let the Measures Team plod aimlessly along, or you'll find your meetings turning into therapy sessions rather than powerful thinktanks that propel performance measurement forward. Have a big picture direction and an action plan all will follow.
CONDITION 11: Nurture the buy-in of your Measures Team members. Give them ownership too of the approach to performance measurement that you're taking, the way they work together, the way they document and coordinate their performance measurement work. But that said, I know many do appreciate having a starting point so they don't have to create everything from scratch. Sometimes they just need to have say, and be heard.
TAKING ACTION:
If you don't have a Measures Team yet, give some serious thought to how you could get one started, using the tips in this article. If you do have a Measures Team, do any of these tips give you ideas to help them work better?
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
#15 Activities, Outputs and Outcomes! Oh My!
As practitioners in the Land of Performance Measurement, we have our own version of Dorothy's 'Lions and tigers and bears' in the Land of Oz.
We have activities, outputs and outcomes. Creatures that seem so much more frightening than they truly are, and mostly because we don't really understand whether and how we are supposed to measure them.
The truth is, we should measure all three.
But don't go skipping down the yellow brick road too quickly, measuring every activity, output and outcome you make friends with along the way.
Let's look first at the relationship between the three, because it's in that relationship that you'll find the answer to how to measure them meaningfully.
Outcomes Are Your Ultimate Performance.
Outcomes are important to measure because it's important that we deliberately define and focus on fulfilling our purpose. Every team should have a purpose, otherwise their talents and energy and the resources they consume are wasted.
The trick with measuring outcomes though, is you have to start with your customer or stakeholder - those people that use your service or product. Only they can define the outcomes that really matter enough to measure.
Outputs Are The Drivers Of Outcome Performance.
Outputs are also important to measure, because they are the drivers of the outcomes. The better your outputs align with your stakeholder outcomes, the better those outcomes will be achieved. It has to be a conscious connection.
Measuring outputs is often easier than outcomes, because unlike outcomes, you can directly see what you are delivering to your customers or stakeholders. And if you can see it, you can measure it. But a word of caution: still take the time to define what those outputs are before you choose measures.
Activities Are The Drivers Of Output Performance.
Activities are also worth measuring, because how well you perform those activities drives the quality of outputs you produce and how well those outputs can create the outcomes your customers and stakeholders want and need.
But the important things to measure about activities are not just how much of them you are doing, but how well you are doing them. And not all activities are worth measuring: only those that have the biggest impact on your outputs and outcomes.
Sketch A Cause-Effect Chain
It's much easier to visualise and communicate the relationship between activites, outputs and outcomes when you can draw the cause-effect relationships between them. With my clients, I use a tool called a Results Map, but you can use a simple flowchart to get started. And before you can click your heels together three times, you'll be on your way to a more meaningful balance of performance measures!
YOUR CHALLENGE:
Take a look at a sample of measures your organisation has now, and work out which are tracking activities, which are tracking outputs and which are tracking outcomes. See if there is a sensible cause-effect relationship between them.
We have activities, outputs and outcomes. Creatures that seem so much more frightening than they truly are, and mostly because we don't really understand whether and how we are supposed to measure them.
The truth is, we should measure all three.
But don't go skipping down the yellow brick road too quickly, measuring every activity, output and outcome you make friends with along the way.
Let's look first at the relationship between the three, because it's in that relationship that you'll find the answer to how to measure them meaningfully.
Outcomes Are Your Ultimate Performance.
Outcomes are important to measure because it's important that we deliberately define and focus on fulfilling our purpose. Every team should have a purpose, otherwise their talents and energy and the resources they consume are wasted.
The trick with measuring outcomes though, is you have to start with your customer or stakeholder - those people that use your service or product. Only they can define the outcomes that really matter enough to measure.
Outputs Are The Drivers Of Outcome Performance.
Outputs are also important to measure, because they are the drivers of the outcomes. The better your outputs align with your stakeholder outcomes, the better those outcomes will be achieved. It has to be a conscious connection.
Measuring outputs is often easier than outcomes, because unlike outcomes, you can directly see what you are delivering to your customers or stakeholders. And if you can see it, you can measure it. But a word of caution: still take the time to define what those outputs are before you choose measures.
Activities Are The Drivers Of Output Performance.
Activities are also worth measuring, because how well you perform those activities drives the quality of outputs you produce and how well those outputs can create the outcomes your customers and stakeholders want and need.
But the important things to measure about activities are not just how much of them you are doing, but how well you are doing them. And not all activities are worth measuring: only those that have the biggest impact on your outputs and outcomes.
Sketch A Cause-Effect Chain
It's much easier to visualise and communicate the relationship between activites, outputs and outcomes when you can draw the cause-effect relationships between them. With my clients, I use a tool called a Results Map, but you can use a simple flowchart to get started. And before you can click your heels together three times, you'll be on your way to a more meaningful balance of performance measures!
YOUR CHALLENGE:
Take a look at a sample of measures your organisation has now, and work out which are tracking activities, which are tracking outputs and which are tracking outcomes. See if there is a sensible cause-effect relationship between them.
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