November 19, 2011

Beware the Unintended Consequences of Performance Measures

What are the behaviours that your organisation’s performance measures encourage? The fact is that all performance measures have consequences and, sometimes, those consequences are unintended, or unforeseen.Let us take an example. Consider a company where “machine efficiency” or “labour efficiency” are KPI’s for managers. What do you get? Well, I can assure you that you

November 9, 2011

Review of “Understanding Variation” by Donald Wheeler

Many management reports compare the current period with this time last year, or with a budget or target figure. Such single-point comparisons, however, ignore the fact of natural variation in all processes and, therefore, can tell us very little. The answer is to present data as a time series with control limits that define

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Beware the Unintended Consequences of Performance Measures

Review of “Understanding Variation” by Donald Wheeler