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more objective to work out who’s performing and
who isn’t.
And so staf quickly adopt Reason #2 for measuring
performance. What happens to overall company/
organizational performance then?
Reason 4: To negotiate for more
resources.
Demonstrate how worthwhile your outputs are, how
capable your team is, how super things could be with
more funding. No-one likes having their budget cut.
Think of all the cool projects that you won’t get to do
if you lose resources.
Funny though, when we give more resources to things
that are working, we deny resources to things that
need help to be improved.
Reason 5: To monitor strategy
execution.
Make sure that the strategic initiatives are being
implemented as planned. We have 57 strategies, and
they all matter. We need to be sure we get them all
done.
Perhaps this is why so many organizations have so
many of what I think is a completely useless type of
performance measure: “the milestone”. But people
will argue until they’re blue in the face that reaching
a milestone for a project or initiative means that
performance must be better. How so, exactly?
Reason 6: To achieve targets set
by the strategy.
Focus on how far current actual performance levels
are from targeted performance levels and using cause
analysis and process improvement techniques to fnd
good ways to lift current performance levels until they
“hit the targets”.
When most people in a company or organization have
this reason for measuring performance, I’d describe
it as a continuous improvement or results-oriented
culture. It could be a very energizing place to work.
Reason 7: To continually improve
capability to achieve the
organization/company vision.
Every performance measure has a line of sight to the
results implied by the mission or vision. Targets are set
to guide resource allocation, but innovation means
the targets are often exceeded. Business experiments
quickly identify the best ways to achieve or exceed
targets. Organizational learning and systems thinking
ensures people are focused on the most elegant ways
to improve performance.
Imagine turning up to work each day, knowing that
virtually everything you and your colleagues were
going to do was verifably contributing to making the
world a better place?
Reason 8: ???
I’m under no illusions that there are only seven
reasons people associate with measuring
performance. Who knows how many there are? But
I am very interested in YOUR personal reason for
measuring performance.
TAKE ACTION
: It might be a good conversation to
have with your colleagues: why do you measure
performance? What are your reasons? Why do you
bother? What value comes from doing it? What value
should come from it? How can your approach to
performance measurement improve, so it can better
fulfl this purpose?
From: http://www.articlesbase.com/management-articles/why-do-you-
measure-performance-5392603.html#ixzz1djRoHKdi