By Stacey Barr
We don’t just measure performance to know we’re making progress. We measure other things too, to monitor our processes, to modify our behaviours, and to celebrate achievements. So for a little side-step to the usual performance measurement stuff, let’s explore the world of progress monitoring.
Progress happens to our results and to our actions. It’s useful to know how well we’re reaching our goals and it’s useful to know how well we’re implementing our actions to reach those goals.
Progress also happens in the moment, as well as over time. It’s useful to know how we’re doing right now, and it’s useful to know what level we’re capable of holding over time.
These four characteristics give us four types of progress measures: performance measures, activity measures, quota measures, and status measures.
Performance Measures monitor the progress of capability.
My performance measurement methodology is all about performance measures, which measure progress of results over time. That’s what defines performance: how a result we want is moving over time toward a target or desired level. They tell us our current capability compared to past capability and desired future capability. XmR charts are the best way to visually monitor these measures.
Examples of performance measures:
- LTIFR by month
- Budget Variance by month
- Average Cycle Time by week
Activity Measures monitor the progress of habits.
Activity measures aren’t really a focus of my performance measurement methodology, because they’re generally quite obvious and don’t require much thinking to choose and monitor. And they mean very little without the context of end results. But they’re good for monitoring consistency in our behaviours, like habits we want to develop that will help our performance measures improve. Like performance measures, we can use XmR charts to monitor activity measures.
Examples of activity measures:
- Travel Requests Processed by week
- Customer Proposals Submitted by month
- Length of Track Maintained by month
Quota Measures monitor the progress of tasks.
Quota measures focus on the completion of a chunk of work that can be quantified. Usually this work is repeatable, and we would set a quota or quantity to aim for. The idea is to strengthen the discipline to get things done. Checklists or tally sheets, where we tick or mark each step toward completion, are the easiest way to visualise these progress measures.
Examples of quota measures:
- Sales Calls Made (aiming for 10 per day)
- Emails Processed (aiming for ‘inbox zero’)
- Words Written (aiming for 1000 per day)
Status Measures monitor the progress of scores.
Status measures tell us our cumulative progress toward some score or total we might want to reach. It might be spending exactly all of our annual budget, earning airline points for gold or platinum status, or growing our customer base. We want to see how far away we are from the status goal, so we can display these measures as cumulative line charts or progressive bar charts.
Examples of status measures:
- Budget Spent
- Year-to-date Profit
- Number of Customers
Which type of progress measure matters most?
It’s not really a question of which progress measure to use, but rather how to use them so they support each other. Quota measures build the discipline to get tasks done. And this discipline builds habits that make activity easier to sustain at higher levels, and also makes tangible progress toward status goals. The right activity progress will help sustain better performance, which in turn will give more leverage to those status goals.
DISCUSSION:
What kinds of progress do you measure? Share some examples and link them to the Measuring Progress model.
About
Stacey Barr is a specialist in organisational performance measurement and creator of PuMP, the refreshingly practical, step-by-step performance measurement methodology designed to overcome people’s biggest struggles with KPIs and measures. Learn about the bad habits that cause these struggles, and how to stop them, by taking Stacey’s free online course “The 10 Secrets to KPI Success” at http://www.staceybarr.com/the10secretstokpisuccess.
