lesson 2: the 3 hottest tips to find meaningful and ... · recall lesson 1 was about the top 5 kpi...

The PuMP Primer Webinar SeriesLesson 2: The 3 Hottest Tips to Find Meaningful and Measurable KPIs for Your Strategy (or Any

Result That Matters).

http://staceybarr.com/webinars/pumpprimerseries

STACEY:

G’day everyone - this is Stacey Barr, and welcome to our second lesson in “The PuMP Primer Webinar Series: 12 practical insights for how to find and implement meaningful performance measures”.

And of course we have my Australian PuMP Partner, Mark Hocknell, with us again. Welcome Mark!

MARK:

Hi Stacey; hi everyone.

STACEY:

What’s the purpose of measuring performance, according to YOU? Why do we do it? What’s the outcome we want?

[Think about it and write it down before you continue reading the transcript.]

We’ll explore this a bit today, about why it’s so important to have a big WHY for doing performance measurement.

If you’re joining for the first time today, that’s tremendous – and I don’t want you to worry that you missed the first lesson.

Today’s lesson can virtually stand on its own, and you won’t get lost just because you missed lesson 1. It’s more important that you made the effort to be here today.

If you’re new today, this is what Mark and I look like, so you know who you’re listening to…




STACEY:

So I’m Stacey Barr. On the left.

MARK:

And I’m Mark Hocknell. On the right, if that’s not obvious.

Here’s where we’re up to in the program…




MARK:

Recall Lesson 1 was about the Top 5 KPI Questions Strategy & Performance Professionals Ask Most – And The Critical One to Answer First.

That most critical question to answer first was “Is there a systematic process to design, implement and use measures or KPIs?”

And we walked through the anatomy that a robust and deliberate performance measurement methodology has.

And we showed you a little about how PuMP is a robust and deliberate performance measurement methodology, by introducing it’s steps, frameworks, templates and tools.

Today’s lesson is where we begin digging into the PuMP methodology’s first few steps, and I’ll share a few pieces of the frameworks for those steps.

And our next two lessons - and read them out – will dig into the remaining steps of PuMP.

STACEY:

If you missed the first lesson or didn’t get the summary transcript, you can get the transcript with slides, and access to the replay, over at

http://staceybarr.com/webinars/pumpprimerseries/details

We’ll email you this link again after today’s webinar.




STACEY:

Today’s lesson is “The 3 Hottest Tips to Find Meaningful and Measurable KPIs for Your Strategy (or Any Result That Matters)”.

We’ll be digging into the first few steps of the PuMP methodology, which include a couple of steps that most people NEVER think to do before they go looking for performance measures.

I wonder if you do these steps… or if you also leave them out, like most people? We’ll find out!

Firstly, let’s take a look at what we’ve got in store for you today…




MARK:

We’ll kick off with how to help people understand what performance measurement is REALLY about, and to feel more excited and curious about it.

Then we’ll discover the step that almost everyone unknowingly leaves out that guarantees it will be IMPOSSIBLE to find truly meaningful performance measures.

And I’ll share with you my recipe for writing a quantitative performance measure, in good form.

Let’s start by exploring how to warm people up to a different idea about performance measurement…




MARK:

Do you recall the fable about how the blind men saw the elephant? Depending on where they were standing, some thought it was a tree trunk, another a rope, another a fan, another a snake… They each had a different understanding of it.

Performance measurement is a bit like this… maybe not as extreme, but differences in assumptions about what performance measurement REALLY means causes some big problems in implementation.

What do your colleagues understand performance measurement to be?

Do they have the wrong idea?

Do they have bad habits that have become ingrained as common practice?

When you don’t test to see if people have different understandings about what performance measurement actually is, you get into trouble.

If you start talking too soon about building a performance dashboard, they are likely to focus on all the data they already have and fill the dashboard quickly with a lot of information that just isn’t useful.

You might get everyone excited to choose 3 measures for their current goals, but when they spend hours choosing milestones or activities, mistaking these for measures, everyone ends up despondent and resentful.

Your assumption that measures should help diagnose and improve business processes might be misinterpreted by others as trying to monitor their individual productivity.

We’ve found repeatedly that we can’t assume people know what good performance measurement is about.




And that means, we have to get everyone on the same page before we begin looking for meaningful measures.




STACEY:

Before looking at training everyone to ‘educate’ them about proper performance measurement, you need to start conversations that help them see the limitations of their current beliefs and practices.

The PuMP Diagnostic is great to get these kinds of conversations started.

The PuMP Diagnostic is a collection of criteria to do with performance measurement. There are 26 criteria in total.

Each criteria is written as a spectrum, from poor practice to excellent practice.

Here’s an example of one of the 26 criteria [see the slide].

There is a rating scale for each criteria, also, ranging from 1 to 10.

The 1 is for poor and the 10 is for excellent.

I will give you a link to where you can download the PuMP Diagnostic in its entirety, but first let’s take a closer look at it…




STACEY:

Let’s play with a sample of the criteria from the PuMP Diagnostic, so you can get a feel for how it triggers good conversations.

I will show you a series of just a few of the criteria from the PuMP Diagnostic, one at a time, and then you can have a go at rating where you think your organisation is on the scale from poor to excellent.

Now, the PuMP Diagnostic is actually a 10-point scale, but we’ll use a 5-point scale because that’s the limit of GoToWebinar Polls!

Here’s the first of the sample criteria…

At the poor end we have: We use milestones or actions as measures e.g. “Implement CRM by June” or “Improve customer complaints process”

At the excellent end we have: Every measure is objective evidence that regularly gauges the degree to which a performance result is occurring over time.

Where is your organisation currently, on this scale?


Let’s do another one…




STACEY:

Here’s the next of the sample criteria…

At the poor end we have: People don’t feel engaged or don’t buy in to performance measures and avoid spending any time on measurement at all.

At the excellent end we have: Everyone values measures as useful feedback to help them do their jobs better and contribute to the organisation’s vision.

Where is your organisation currently, on this scale?


Let’s do one last sample…




STACEY:

Here’s the next of the sample criteria…

At the poor end we have: Measures are used as a tool to assess people’s performance.

At the excellent end we have: Measures are used to assess business and process performance, as a tool for people to make decisions and take action.

Where is your organisation, currently, on this scale?


That will do us. So you can see that having people talking about these criteria can make them aware of important things to think about with performance measurement, and also give them a vision of what excellent measurement is about.

Of course, because of the rating scale, you also get to measure your performance measurement maturity over time!

Here’s how you can download the PuMP Diagnostic for your own use…




STACEY:

The PuMP Diagnostic tools are a PowerPoint file that steps your team through the diagnostic together, and a spread sheet to capture the ratings and summarise them.

You can download both these tools at:

http://staceybarr.com/about/pump/diagnostic

So here’s the important insight that the PuMP Diagnostic will help you with…




MARK:

Make sure everyone has the same understanding of what performance measurement is BEFORE you start measuring performance!

You need conversations to test if everyone is on the same page or not. And you need conversations to help shift everyone on to the same page about what performance measurement really is.

And the PuMP Diagnostic is a simple and engaging and fun way to start those conversations!

In the PuMP Diagnostic, there are a few criteria devoted solely to the design of your strategy. This might seem a bit strange for a performance measurement diagnostic, but let’s see why this matters, shall we?




MARK:

You’re attempting to measure mumbo-jumbo when the goal or objective you want to measure sounds:

• Too intangible

• Too vague

• Too motherhood

There are several features that make goals or objectives really hard to measure, but one of them that everyone needs to practice avoiding.

It’s the use of mumbo-jumbo or weasel words to write the goals. Words like:

Accountable, advanced, best-practice, capable, consolidated, diversity, efficient, enhanced, functional, holistic, integrated, optimal, productive, responsiveness and sustainability.

Can you recognise mumbo-jumbo – weasel words - in your organisation’s goals and objectives?

[Think about it and write down some of the weasel words that come to mind now, before you continue reading the transcript.]

STACEY:

Wikipedia defines ‘mumbo-jumbo’ as: “an English phrase or expression that denotes a confusing or meaningless subject. It is often used as humorous expression of criticism of middle-management and civil service non-speak, and of belief in practices based on superstition, rituals intending to cause confusion or languages that the speaker does not understand.”




TheFreeDictionary.com defines it as: “1. Unintelligible or incomprehensible language; gibberish. 2. Language or ritualistic activity intended to confuse. 3. A complicated or obscure ritual. 4. An object believed to have supernatural powers; a fetish.”

And Google search defines it as “language or ritual causing or intended to cause confusion or bewilderment.”

That’s the clue it’s a weasely goal: people feel confused about what it means, or if you ask several people, they have different interpretations of what it means.

MARK:

So if a goal or objective is filled with these weasel words or mumbo-jumbo, it doesn’t make it strategic or high-level or professional. It makes it confusing, meaningless, unintelligible, incomprehensible, complicated and bewildering non-speak.

You can’t measure what you don’t understand.

So if you want to measure mumbo-jumbo goals and objectives, what can you do about it?




STACEY:

Here are some very simple steps to follow to de-weasel your goals and objectives so you can measure them:

1. Write down the goal or objective you want to measure. Just do one at a time.

2. Highlight or circle or underline the weasel words – any word you are not 100% certain of the meaning of… or any word that your colleagues cannot produce the same definition of.

3. Ask whoever wrote the goal or objective what they intended by those words.

4. Write down new meanings for those words. Are there any weasel words left? Go back to step 2.

5. Reword the goal or objective to say what you really mean, in everyday language.

I’m going to say something critically important now…

This takes time to practice! You won’t get it right the first time. You need to stay vigilant and keep practicing how to de-weasel. It is such an ingrained bad habit to write mumbo-jumbo and it’s very tough to unlearn it.

But unlearn it you must, if you want to measure your goals and achieve them. Anything else is just pretending.

Let’s summarise in Practical Insight #5…




MARK:

If you cannot understand a goal or objective well enough to visualise what it looks like when it’s happening, you won’t be able to measure it.

If you try to measure a weasely goal or objective, you’ll end up with very lame measures: they won’t truly be evidence of the result you’re trying to achieve or create.

But, when you have nice and understandable goals and objectives, you can more easily measure them. Let’s see how to write a good measure…




STACEY:

Do you remember the 1988 animated movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

This is Jessica Rabbit, and she’s renowned for having a nice figure.

Nice figures for KPIs or performance measures mean something a bit different, of course. It’s about writing your performance measure in a way that clearly communicates the quantification method you’re using to monitor your goal or objective.

A lot of people are either very lazy about this, or they just don’t appreciate how important it is…




MARK:

Writing your measure properly, right from the start when you choose them, will save a lot of time later on that gets wasted when people misunderstand the measure:

• The wrong data gets collected

• The wrong calculation is performed to produce the measure’s values

• The measure is displayed the wrong way for the kind of question it’s supposed to answer

• Or… the measure never gets implemented because no-one can figure out what it means.

Badly written measures look like these:

• Milestones, like ‘student learning outcomes analysis complete by Dec 2014’

• Activities, like ‘gather ideas from students to improve the learning experience’

• Data sources, like ‘Student Survey’

• Vague names, like ‘Student Engagement’

Do you have too many badly written measures like these? Let’s find out…




STACEY:

Which of the following types of badly written measures does your organisation have?

• Milestones

• Activities

• Sources of data

• Vague names

• None of the above


It’s so simple to write a measure properly… you just need a recipe…




STACEY:

There are 4 essential parts to writing a good measure:

Firstly, the statistic. average, median, percentage, number, total, etc…

Secondly, the performance attribute data item(s): exactly what you are applying the statistic to. What exactly are you averaging? What exactly are you counting? What exactly are you taking a percentage of? For example: students who participated in learning activities, or all students, or students who got a job in their field of study.

Thirdly, the temporal data item: day, week, month, quarter. It’s about how frequently you want to calculate the values of your measure, so you can monitor it often enough to pick up signals of change.

Finally we have the measure name + measure description. This is how you put it all together. For example:

Student Participation Rate = The percentage of students who participated in learning activities, by week

And so Practical Insight #6 becomes…




MARK:

Always write your measures with a name and a description based on a statistic, a performance attribute data item, and a temporal data item.

It’s not hard to do this, and it will make it so much easier to:

• Check if the measure really is a good one for the goal or objective

• Help people understand the measure

• Implement the measure as you intended.

And we have just covered a small selection of tips from the first 3 steps in the PuMP Blueprint performance measure methodology…




MARK:

Here’s what we covered today, in exploring those first 3 steps of the PuMP Blueprint:

Step 1 in PuMP is Understanding Measurement’s Purpose.

In Lesson 1 there is one technique for this step:

• a diagnostic to help people appreciate what good performance measurement is about, which we call the PuMP Diagnostic

We’ve just explored 3 of the 26 criteria that make up the PuMP Diagnostic, which we’re giving you to download and use to start new conversations about what performance measurement REALLY is, with your colleagues.

STACEY:

Step 2 in in PuMP is Mapping Measurable Results.

In Lesson 1 we mentioned two techniques for this step:

• a collection of tests to see how measurable a goal is, called the Measurability Tests

• an hierarchical method for arranging measures in cause-effect relationships, called the Results Map

Today we explored one of the 5 measurability tests: weasel words, and how to de-weasel your goal or objective to make it more measurable.

MARK:

Step 3 in in PuMP is Designing Meaningful Measures.




In Lesson 1 we mentioned the Measure Design technique we use for this step:

• a technique for designing measures for any goal, measures that are the most direct quantitative evidence for that goal

And what we played with today was the formula – or recipe – for how to write a measure.

The remaining steps we’re going to explore in our next two lessons in The PuMP Primer Webinar Series.

STACEY:

You can see, can’t you, that there is more to developing truly meaningful performance measures that just what we talked about today.

You can certainly make some improvements to your performance measurement approach with these tips today, so don’t hesitate to start using them.




STACEY:

You’ll be astonished at how much more how-to power you can get by spending two days to learn the entire PuMP methodology.

And then a third day which is 100% practical, where you put the first few steps to use and create great measures for your own goals.

Learning a methodology as practical and logical as PuMP really is an investment. It’s not a cost. The costs of the waste caused by an ad hoc performance measurement approach are a bazillion times greater than the cost of switching to a proper approach.

We have PuMP workshops all around the world for 2017, including a few in Australia that either Mark or I will be teaching.

You can check them out, read a lot more detail about the structure of the workshop, and register here:

http://performancemeasureblueprint.com

Time to wrap up Lesson 2…




MARK:

Lesson 3 is about The 5 Essential Design Inputs For Actionable Performance Reports that WOW Decision-Makers.

We’ll cover:

• The fastest and easiest way to build excitement and buy-in for your performance measures.

• The simplest little discipline that dramatically reduces waste and rework in your performance reporting.

• The 3 (and only 3) questions your performance report should answer to trigger improvement rather than excuses and blame.

Book it in your diary so you hold the space for it: Remember there are no replays for The PuMP Primer Series: it’s you and me, live. So don’t miss out!

STACEY:

Thanks everyone for joining in today.

Did you learn something new today?

Let’s keep up the energy and engagement for our third lesson in The PuMP Primer Series, tomorrow.

Thank you for sharing your time with us today: this is Stacey Barr and Mark Hocknell, signing off.

lesson 2: the 3 hottest tips to find meaningful and ... · recall lesson 1 was about the top 5 kpi...

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