Made to Measure Blog
How to Prepare a KPI Report: Dashboard Design Checklist for Clearer Insights
Make your reports easier to read, nicer to look at, and more useful. Let’s be honest-most KPI reports are either a hot mess or just plain dull. If you’ve ever looked at your own report and thought, “Why isn’t this working?”… this is for you. What Is the Dashboard Design Checklist? It’s a comprehensive list…
How to Make Measurement Drive Real Change
Are Your KPIs Gathering Dust? How to Make Measurement Drive Real Change We’ve all been there. Strategic plans with perfectly aligned Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), dashboards brimming with data, reports dutifully produced each month. Yet, despite all this activity, performance doesn’t seem to budge, decisions still feel like educated guesses, and improvement remains elusive. Why…
Are Your KPIs Helping or Hurting? The Critical Difference Between Measuring Performance and Judging People
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Just hearing the term can evoke a range of emotions in the workplace. For some, they represent clarity, direction, and a path to improvement. For many others, however, they are instruments of anxiety, distrust, and even perceived punishment. This stark difference in perception often boils down to one fundamental issue:…
Ultimate XmR SmartChart Guide
Contents Are Your KPIs Lying to You? Discover the Truth with SmartCharts As managers, we rely on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to tell us how our business is performing. We chart them over time, watch for trends, and compare them against targets or previous periods. Yet, despite these efforts, making informed decisions based on our…
‘Would not recommend’: Why Net Promoter Score is dangerous
Would you recommend our company to a friend or colleague? This innocent-sounding question has spawned a multi-billion dollar measurement industry. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) has become the default measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty for most major corporations. Two-thirds of Fortune 1000 companies use it. There’s just one small problem – it doesn’t work.…
6 Disadvantages of a Balanced Scorecard
The balanced scorecard (BSC) has been a buzzword in performance management since Kaplan and Norton introduced it in the ’90s. But is it as flawless as it seems? Before making it part of your performance measurement and strategic plan, let’s check out some surprising downsides you need to know. 6 Biggest Disadvantages of Balanced Scorecards:…
5 Advantages of a Balanced Scorecard
Developed in the early ’90s by American management consultants David Norton and Robert Kaplan, the balanced scorecard (BSC) has quickly become a go-to tool for performance measurement and strategic planning. In fact, around half of Fortune 1000 companies in the USA and 40% of large European firms now rely on it (Source: Bernard Marr). At its…
How to Get Staff Buy-In for KPIs in 5 Steps
Let’s be honest-talking about ‘KPI buy-in’ might be a bit of a stretch at first. In most cases, when you’re rolling out key metrics, what you’re really aiming for is to avoid resistance and persuade people to comply with gathering the data. Truly getting employee buy-in usually only happens once people start seeing the actual…
Building a KPI Habit
Why a KPI habit is essential A KPI that is never reviewed or acted upon might as well not exist. Worse than that, an unreviewed KPI is a kind of ‘tax’ on the organisation, a costly piece of information that was never looked at or acted upon. Forming a ‘KPI habit’, particularly for short-term KPIs,…
Teaching to the test
Benjamin Wann Guest author Teaching to the test On October 19, 2009, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke a story with the provocative title “Are Drastic Swings in CRCT Scores Valid?” The CRCT acronym referred to the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, which were, as the article specified, “Georgia’s main measure of academic ability through eighth grade.” The report…