Four Situations Where You Should Abandon Your KPIs

By David Parmenter

I have been working with performance measures for over 20 years, and in that time I have witnessed minimal progress in the right direction. Deriving measures is often viewed as an afterthought. They are regarded as something we fill into a box to say we have achieved a goal.

However, I firmly believe that performance measures exist for a higher purpose; helping align the staff’s daily actions to the organization’s critical success factors”.

Yet, in reality, measures are often a random collection prepared with little expertise signifying nothing.  To make matters worse these measures cost the organization dearly:

  1. Measures gamed to the detriment of the organization so that executives can increase their pay.
  2. Teams encouraged to perform tasks that are contrary to the organization’s strategic direction.
  3. Costly “measurement and reporting” regimes that locks up valuable staff and management time.
  4. Prepared by consultants rather than by an in-house KPI team.

A radical treatment for a radical problem

Why would an author who has made a living from preaching about implementing winning KPIs now have a change of heart? The answer lies in his witnessing the failure of many performance measurement initiatives.

After twenty years of presenting and writing to advocate the proper use of performance measures I am now convinced, that in many cases, a more radical approach is necessary.

The medical profession, for centuries, has realized that …… click here to access pdf

To understand more

This information has been extracted from David Parmenter’s Key Performance Indicators (4th Edition) which is the highest rated KPI book on Amazon.

To understand more about the difference of these two types of measures, you can access, free of charge, chapter one, “The Great KPI Misunderstanding”.

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