Aligning Performance Measures

The best way to predict the future is to... ...create it!

Traditionally, the approach to identifying organisational measures is often to ask the question "what can we measure". The argument for such an approach is that "if you cannot measure it, you cannot control it". Unfortunately, all too often this approach leads organisations into a situation where they are measuring everything, but controlling nothing.

In such situations, organisations can often suffer from "paralysis by analysis", where a number of different measurement systems are giving unrelated or conflicting performance information. Equally likely is that a whole organisation's strategy is based on achieving whatever is easy to measure. Even when it appears that everything that can be measured is being measured, managers often find it is almost impossible to extract the information they require to make effective decisions. These types of situations are clearly not the conditions that maximise an organisation's ability to achieve future success.

The factors that an organisation needs to urgently control are those factors that are critical to its success. Thus, in order to identify which factors to measure, it is essential to work back from the desired future and identify not just the critical factors, but the factors that are most uncertain and thus in most need of control.

However, simply measuring performance does not automatically mean that performance will automatically be controlled or improved. If there is not a complete control system in place to use the information effectively, then the cost of monitoring is potentially a wasted cost.

The Perception Dynamics approach to aligning measurement systems addresses all these problems. It identifies the measures most critical to success and ensures that their trends can be monitored. Equally important, the approach shows how to create psychological contracts to ensure there is genuine ownership of ensuring that critical performance are achieved in the predicted timescales.

The Perception Dynamics approach to aligning measurements enables you to integrate all measurement systems into a single aligned performance control system. This includes financial systems, Balanced Scorecards, EFQM, Performance Indicators, Service, Strategic and Operational Measures.