Stacey Barr

This case study is a process definition for a Billing Process, adapted from a real freight business. It shows the steps for not only improving a business process, but using the process to identify both Process Result and In-Process measures.

Many people still believe that the purpose of business is make a profit, that financial success is the ultimate measure of business success. But at what expense?

Bec used the PuMP technique of Results Mapping with one of DECS' country schools. This school had fairly high levels of disadvantage, and fortunately it also had the most enthusiastic and positive staff that Bec has worked with. This school underwent a review that recommended specific improvements to their performance.

You might think that rolling up your performance measures or KPIs into weighted indexes or scores is a great strategy to simplify your dashboard, to deal with lots of measures, or to create proxies for hard-to-measure goals. Think again.

Needless to say, "Action Plans" are very important for every organization. However, when it comes to setting KPIs, "Action without a Clear Goal" is equal to "doing NOTHING" or even wasting your time and resources before you notice...

In the article "Why 8 Weeks For a KPI Project?" I suggested that when you're using a new performance measurement methodology, like the PuMP Blueprint, your first few implementations will have more success if they are quick, focused and allow for unlearning of bad KPI habits. So what would those 8 weeks look like? Here's the way we do it...

It's quite easy to underestimate just how much it takes to transform an organisation's approach to performance measurement. There are many set-in bad habits that cause the very problems with performance measurement that people would love to solve.

Where are the predictive performance measures? Well apparently they're not in the rear-view mirror. That, apparently, is where you find the lag measures. But the rear-view mirror analogy is not entirely accurate when it comes to defining lead and lag measures. So it's time to blow it up.

Performance measurement is like anything else - you can do it anywhere on the scale between awful and awesome. How to figure out where on the scale you are? You have to start by defining what awful and awesome is, and that means defining the outcome of performance measurement.

Before you can successfully find meaningful performance measures, you have to know what a good performance is. Sometimes it's easier to start by defining what ugly performance measures are, because the flipside of what makes a measure ugly helps you define what makes a measure good. These are examples I gathered from various businesses and organisations of so-called measures for a customer service goal. They are all UGLY performance measures.