I have worked closely with Dr. David Norton, co-creator of the Balanced Scorecard for more than twelve years. He has been championing the evolution of the Balanced Scorecard from a measurement concept to a management concept for the last twenty years. He speaks publicly more than once a month on the topic of the Balanced Scorecard. If you listened to him each presentation, you might think that he would get tired presenting the same material. But if you listen closely, you will see that the material evolves as the research evolves. I had the chance to listen to Dr. Norton this week in Mexico City, and listening closely, I was inspired during each presentation that the Balanced Scorecard concept is alive and well.

Laura Downing, one of our founding partners, knows that I have a serious thing against averages. Every time someone says "the average went up", or the "average went down" she looks over to see my face contort in horror. So what's the big deal with averages?

We were recently working with a client on their Balanced Scorecard report and noticed something very interesting. While they had 6 years of data recorded, they only wanted to show the last two. Being a little bit of a performance geek, I had to ask why they were hiding those other 4 years, especially as the trend represented by the previous two years did not match the longer trend.

In my last post, "The Measures That Matter," I discussed the costliness of having too many measures and the importance of utilizing only the measures that highlight performance against your objectives. I talked about defining measurements that are linked back to objectives, but I never touched on actually creating those objectives. So, I would now like to take a small step backwards and discuss the development of objectives for your organization.

I'm a big fan of Monty Python, and a big fan of spiced canned meat, but I have to say that I'm not a big fan of random spam that comes to me (and other unfortunate blog owners) via comment spam. We've tried using CAPTCHA codes to slow them down, we've tried blacklisting IP addresses, and it's just a battle you can't win. Most of the spam doesn't even make any sense! So, effective today, we're moderating comments on this site. So, yes, I will still get to enjoy the crazy comments, but hopefully I can spare some of you. Continue past the break for the eponymous skit.

"It's great to be among my fellow Performance Management Geeks." An apropos opening by Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) at the 2011 Performance Symposium presented by the Department of Defense with the Performance Improvement Council. Senator Warner was one of many influential speakers who delivered high impact presentations to an audience of Lean Six Sigma Black Belts, Performance Improvement Officers and every other flavor of performance management professional that you will find across the federal government. As a proud member of the Performance Management Geeks club I wanted to capture some of the key messages and takeaways from the symposium and share them here.

In the previous post, Mark Cutler highlighted a recent Wall Street Journal article entitled "School Reform, Chicago Style." Near the end of the post, he mentions that one issue for Chicago Public Schools may be the fact that they are measuring too many things. This got me thinking about how important it is to spend time determining the appropriate measures for your organization, and making sure they are tied directly back to the strategy. Having too many measures can be a drain on an organization's time and resources, without providing much added benefit. With budgets being cut and more supporters demanding proof of impact, measuring the wrong things can be costly in more ways than one.

An article in Saturday, June 25's Wall Street Journal, "School Reform, Chicago Style," provided an interesting picture on measuring performance.

The schools were gathering a lot of data. "Two number crunchers at Marshall [High School] digested tens of thousands of data points, from the frequency of fights to cheerleaders' GPAs." After a year's worth of data collection and analysis, some schools in Chicago were seeing "promising trends."

Does everyone in your organization clearly understand the organizational strategy and how they fit into it? Employees want to know where they fit into the overall strategy, and how their roles contribute to the success of the organization. A clear understanding of the organizational strategy is fundamental to achieving goals and objectives. The key to developing this understanding at all levels of an organization is effective communication. When implementing the Balanced Scorecard, the scope of an organization's internal communication can make or break the efforts.

OK, I forgot to finish my story about my plane flight and the nice woman who was so poorly introduced to the Balanced Scorecard by her University. Well, it turns out that she did have some established goals in her department, and at the end of the year, she was evaluated on these goals as well as several other measures as part of her Balanced Scorecard review. She said "it would have been nice if they would have told me what they were measuring before they gave me the evaluation." I responded, in a very sophisticated manner, "Duh!"