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The Seven Deadly KPI Sins

14 September, 2011 by Bernie Smith Leave a Comment

KPI Sins

Ignorance ~ Not knowing why you are measuring something Greed ~ Too many measures Stupidity ~ Having measures and targets that drive destructive behaviours Inexperience ~ Not understanding “noise” in data and running off to fix things that aren’t really broken. Vanity ~ Dressing up and displaying data in an incomprehensible way Wastefulness ~ Burying the message in unnecessary […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: communication, key performance indicators, measurement

Measure Anything the Sesame Street Way

6 August, 2011 by James Lawther 2 Comments

There are a lot of intangible things in life, things that affect the service that you are delivering and the business that you are running.   Things that you would love to know, but are frankly just impossible to find out.  How about these for a couple of examples: How effective are your managers? How […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis, Tools & Techniques Tagged With: assumptions, decisions, key performance indicators, measurement, video

Management Reports, Horses and Camels

11 July, 2011 by Bernie Smith 1 Comment

Horse and Car

Design and big groups just don’t work.  There’s the old joke about a camel being a horse that was designed by a committee.  It’s no accident that the most successful aesthetic designs of even the most expensive and complex products normally come down to a handful of people at most. It’s the same with the […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: clarity, key performance indicators, measurement

Zombies and KPI’s

20 May, 2011 by Bernie Smith 1 Comment

DIY KPIs

I subscribe to quite a few performance measurement emails, web sites and blogs.  I’ve noticed a worrying trend of sites offering “off the shelf” KPIs.  In fact you can now buy books packed with “ideal” KPIs for all sorts of businesses (oh, how the long winter nights must fly by). Are the measures in these […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: best practice, clarity, customer focus, key performance indicators, measurement, service improvement, strategy, zombies

Too Much Information

5 March, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

In the US in the late 1980’s a psychologist called Paul Andreassen conducted an experiment on some business school students. He gave them all a portfolio of stocks and shares to trade and then divided them into two groups. One group were allowed access to a stream of financial information, they could talk to market […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: clarity, complexity, data is not information, key performance indicators, process control

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