Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success

by Dean R. Spitzer

It's no secret that you can't improve your organization's performance without measuring it. In fact, every function, unit, process, and the organization as a whole, is built and run according to the parameters and expectations of its measurement system. So you'd better make sure you're doing it right. All too often, performance measurement creates dysfunction, whether among individuals, teams, or across entire divisions and companies. Most traditional measurement systems actually encourage unhealthy competition for personal gain, creating internal conflict and breeding distrust of performance measurement. Transforming Performance Measurement presents a breakthrough approach that will not only significantly reduce those dysfunctions, but also promote alignment with business strategy, maximize cross-enterprise integration, and help everyone to work collaboratively to drive value throughout your organization. Performance improvement thought leader Dean Spitzer explains why performance measurement should be less about calculations and analysis and more about the crucial social factors that determine how well the measurements get used. His ""socialization of measurement"" process focuses on learning and improvement from measurement, and on the importance of asking such questions as: How well do our measures reflect our business model? How successfully are they driving our strategy? What should we be measuring and not measuring? Are the right people having the right measurement discussions? Performance measurement is a dynamic process that calls for an awareness of the balance necessary between seemingly disparate ideas: the technical and the social aspects of performance measurement. For example, you need technology to manage the flood of data, but you must make sure that it supports the people who will be making decisions and taking action crucial to your organization's success. This book shows you how to design that technical-social balance into your measurement system. While it is urgent to start taking action now, transforming your organization's performance measurement system will take time. Transforming Performance Measurement gives you assessment tools to gauge where you are now and a roadmap for moving, with little or no disruption, to a more "transformational" and mature measurement system. The book also provides 34 TMAPs, Transformational Measurement Action Plans, which suggest both well-accepted and "emergent" measures (in areas such as marketing, human resources, customer service, knowledge management, productivity, information technology, research and development, costing, and more) that you can use right away. In the end, you get what you measure. If you measure the wrong things, you will take your company farther and farther away from its mission and strategic goals. Transforming Performance Measurement tells you not only what to measure, but how to do it -- and in what context -- to make a truly transformational difference in your enterprise.

Genres: Business, Management

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Jurgen Appelo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good ideas about metrics with a more social/holistic perspective, unfortunately managed through top-down management frameworks. This is no "paradigm shift" at all, but pure old-fashioned hierarchical bureaucracy.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book as a required element in a graduate-level syllabus fornancourse I taught. 3While of course textbook-ish in nature, this book was nonetheless easy to read and practical. Kudos to Spitzer for a realistic approach to performance measurement. The sections on quantitative measurement were thorough; those on qualitative measurement were less so. That was not surprising, and Spitzer's efforts to convince the reader to explore qualitative measurement were largely effective.

The author seemingly had an aversion to technological solutions, though I felt it was more toward the mindset that tech solves all rather than acts as a force multiplier. Some of my students disagreed with my assessment in this regard.

Like any book of this nature, it is helpful but not a solution in its own right.

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too theoretical to be much help to me (a KPI newbie looking for some beginner's insight), but still managed to offer some sound advice about the human systems needed to keep measurements in check. Some of the examples given are a bit laughable now, but this was the nineties.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success
Dean R. Spitzer
AMACOM

In this remarkable volume, Dean Spitzer urges his reader to re-think how to measure and drive organizational success, whatever the size and nature of the give organization may be. He offers a number of performance measures and ways of measures that can have a "transformational impact" on the way people in organizations view the work, their products, their associates, and their customers. He asks his reader to begin to view measurement itself "through a new lens" when correlating the material in this book with her or his own organization. "Perhaps the most surprising truth covered in this book is that the `context of measurement' [i.e. `an optimal environment for its effective use'] will largely determine its effectiveness." Spitzer offers two significant reassurances in the Introduction: transformational measurement doesn't require a major change in a business structure or systems, "but only in how you think about measuring your organization; moreover, "on those occasions when measurement is used for the purpose of improvement rather than to make judgments or place blame, and when it is focused on the right measures, its true power is revealed."

Spitzer carefully organizes his material within and 13 chapters as he explains why transformational measurement is so powerful, what happens when measurement "goes bad, why it does so, the beginning of the transformation process, how to create a positive context of measurement, on what to focus when measuring, how to integrate measurement, the nature and extent of interactivity of measurement, the leadership required by effective measurement, what can be learned about and from measurement, what the uses and abuses of measurement technology are, how to achieve and then sustain "performance measurement maturity," and then in Chapter 13 for purposes of review, what transformational measures are and aren't as well as what they offer in terms of their capabilities and potential benefits. Then in his final chapter, after having established a multi-dimensional frame-of-reference (i.e. a proper "context") for his own core concepts, Spitzer examines 34 different transformational measurement "action plans.” In my opinion, this is the single best source for determining how to devise and execute performance measurement that will drive organizational success.

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book provides useful information but reads like a textbook. Some concepts are obvious like people will focus on what gets measured, not necessarily what management wanted to be done. If management is measuring the length of customer calls, employees will end calls quickly (not resolve the problems effectively). People will figure out how to "game" the system. But like a textbook, each concept is covered thoroughly and supported with examples. A useful concept to consider is the downstream consequences of a measurement. For example, the Purchasing Department is rewarded for getting low prices. This would induce the department to buy in larger quantities, which then causes huge inventory. It would have been nice if the book ended each chapter with a checklist of actions for setting measurements.

[Elaine]

Measuring performance is pervasive and powerful, and it underlies all process improvement.

This book is in the library.