Posts
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…
Keeping Score & Rats in Hanoi
Benjamin Wann Guest author Keeping Score “If a strategy is to be achieved, it must be publicly tracked, measured, and monitored. If you are trying to lose weight, you must get on the scales regularly.” -David Maister “What Gets Measured, Gets Done.” -Unknown Think about the last time you watched a casual game of pickup…
ROKS in the wild…
Teradata like the ROKS KPI Canvas… It looks like Dan Simerlink, of Teradata Business Value Consulting, read KPI Checklists and really liked the KPI definition template I shared, check out page 8 of his PDF white-paper below. Click on the image to download the original PDF.
Your strategic objectives are probably not unique. That’s a good thing
Why your business probably isn’t as unique as you think… It’s always said that there are two things that everyone thinks they possess – good driving ability and a sense of humour. I’d like to add one more to that list – thinking ‘their business is unique’. After a frightening number of hours running KPI…
5 Common Dashboard Design Mistakes (and How to Fix Them)
How many of us have been here: you’ve spent hours building a dashboard. You’ve pulled in all the latest numbers, added data visualisation, polished it up, and shared it with your team. And then… chaos. Stakeholders are firing questions left, right, and centre: “Wait, what does this chart mean?” “Why is this important?” “Are we…
How to avoid this common Excel disaster…
On 4 January 2010, in the Marriott hotel in Atlanta, two giants in the world of economics, Prof Carmen Reinhart and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Ken Rogoff, were presenting their research paper, ‘Growth in a Time of Debt’. Their message from their research turned the heads of global leaders and pushed…
Did an Excel mistake cripple the world economy?
On 4 January 2010, in the Marriott hotel in Atlanta, two giants in the world of economics, Prof Carmen Reinhart and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Ken Rogoff, were presenting their research paper, ‘Growth in a Time of Debt’. The headline message was clear and head-turning… When the size of the country’s…
The worst Excel user ever?
At the start of my career, I worked with someone who used to moan ALL the time about how terrible Excel was. After weeks of complaints, I decided to see if I could help, just to stop the complaining. I sat down next to him and quickly discovered he was using the ‘shapes and lines’…