Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Developing Metrics and KPI (Key Performance Indicators

KPI-Metric-Flow-500


 


This presentation covers the basics of developing successful performance metrics; from developing winning KPIs, learning how to develop the right metrics, the rules of developing KPIs and metrics and common performance metrics for managing a successful organization.


 


http://www.slideshare.net/victorholman/developing-metrics-that-drive-performance-success



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Victor Holman is a Marketing and Business Performance Expert and CEO of Lifecycle Performance Professionals.  His Business Done For You Service helps small business owners level the playing field with larger, higher budget competitors by delivering high performance marketing, management and social media solutions that build credibility and expert status, and generate steady leads and increased profits.  http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com/Business-Strategies/business-done-for-you-system.html


Get FREE ACCESS to his highly acclaimed Insider’s Secrets Club, which provides the latest business growth tools and strategies to explode your income.   http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com/Free-Stuff/free-insiders-secrets-club-signup.html


Get a FREE Performance Management Kit at http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com/Free-Stuff/free-kit.html


Visit Victor at www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com or www.victorholman.com today


 



Developing Metrics and KPI (Key Performance Indicators

Friday, November 8, 2013

What Is Lifecycle Performance Management?

 


LPM-Methodology


Lifecycle Performance Management is the systematic implementation of an enterprise-wide performance strategy involving all business units, systems and personnel.  It is a sequence of management processes, when combined, achieves a complete approach to managing performance from start to finish.  Lifecycle Performance Management focuses on all areas that determine the success of an enterprise, including:



  • Employees

  • Department / Business Units

  • Processes

  • Finance

  • Programs (e.g. implementing organizational policies)

  • Products/Services

  • Projects


Key components of Lifecycle Performance Management include:



  • Integrating key documents into a performance plan

  • Aligning performance to organizational goals

  • Applying best practices and key performance activities

  • Identifying the right metrics

  • Developing a plan to act on the results

  • Constantly improving the knowledge and performance of your people, processes and technology.


Lifecycle Performance Management includes integrating multiple data sources and understanding what processes make your organization most productive.  It involves revisiting core processes and identifying ways to maximize and continuously improve performance.


——————-


Victor Holman is a Business Performance Expert and CEO of Lifecycle Performance Professionals.  His Business Done For You Service helps small business owners level the playing field with larger, higher budget competitors by delivering high performance marketing, management and social media solutions that build credibility and expert status, and generate steady leads and increased profits.


Get FREE ACCESS to his highly acclaimed Insider’s Secrets Club, which provides the latest business growth tools and strategies to explode your income.


http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com/Free-Stuff/free-insiders-secrets-club-signup.html


Get a FREE Performance Management Kit at http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com/Free-Stuff/free-kit.html


Learn more about his Business Done For You Service


http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com/Business-Strategies/business-done-for-you-system.html


Visit Victor at www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com or www.victorholman.com today



What Is Lifecycle Performance Management?

Thursday, November 7, 2013

The Data Integration Lifecycle

Data Integration Processes and Tools-500


Data integration is the process of combining data residing at different sources and providing the user with a unified view of the data.


Access – Data comes from many sources, including legacy application and systems, databases, modern applications, various XML messages and numerous types of documents (spreadsheets, project plans, text documents, etc).  Identifying and accessing these sources is the first step to data integration.


Discovery - This involves bringing all data sources out into the open, and documenting the uses and structures of poorly understood or described sources.  This is also the point at which data semantics (patterns or rules that emerge from its structure and use) and quality issue should be noted and flagged for further action.


Cleansing – Data is cleaned up for accuracy and integrity.  Clean-up can involve detecting and correcting errors, supplying missing elements and value, enforcing data standards, validating data and purging duplicate entries.


Integration - This step involves consolidating data across all systems and applications, accessing their fragmented data, creating an accurate and consistent view of their information assets, and leveraging those assets to drive business decisions and operations.  This often means resolving inconsistent utilization and definition for identical terms across different contexts.


Delivery – Correct, relevant data is made available in proper form, in a timely manner, to all users and applications that need such access.  This might mean responding to queries that result in single records or small answer sets to delivering entire data sets for trend analysis or enterprise-wide reporting.  This step also addresses needs for data security, availability, privacy and compliance requirements related to access and use.


Development and Management - This is where XML-based toolsets enable those who manage data; business analysts, architects, developers and managers to work together in creating a comprehensive set of data integration rules, processes, practices and procedures, thereby capturing and implementing all the substantive work done in the five preceding steps.  This step also tackles issues related to performance, scalability and reliability needs for key enterprise applications and services.


Auditing, Monitoring and Reporting – Once its semantics and uses have been captured, omissions remedied, errors corrected, and quality examined and assured, ongoing observation and analysis is required to keep the data clean, correct, reliable and available.  This part of the process makes it possible to flag potential issues as they occur and to cycle  them back through this lifecycle to make sure they resolved.  Auditing also helps to make sure that data remains visible, under control, and able to guide future changes and enhancements.


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Victor Holman is a Business Performance Expert and CEO of Lifecycle Performance Professionals.  His Business Done For You Service helps small business owners level the playing field with larger, higher budget competitors by delivering high performance marketing, management and social media solutions that build credibility and expert status, and generate steady leads and increased profits.


Get FREE ACCESS to his highly acclaimed Insider’s Secrets Club, which provides the latest business growth tools and strategies to explode your income.


Get a FREE Performance Management Kit at http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com/Free-Stuff/free-kit.html


Visit Victor at www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com or www.victorholman.com today



The Data Integration Lifecycle

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

11 Steps to Improving Performance Through Data Collection and Gap Analysis

Performance-Improvement-Process-600


It is believed that metrics teams can only get 80% of the way to an effective set of metrics. The last 20% comes from deploying the metrics, seeing how they affect performance, and then adjusting them accordingly. The same can be said about the performance which these metrics guide. One of the main reasons we measure performance is so that we can identify weaknesses and areas of improvements. What we do once we identify these weakness and areas of improvement is what determines how effective our performance initiative, and in turn, organization will be. The purpose of performance improvement is not to point fingers and place blame on a group or individuals that are not performing well, nor is it intended to solve problems. Performance improvement is simply a way of looking at how an organization can perform better. The difficulty with performance improvement, especially in an enterprise organization, is understanding which processes are working well and which aren’t and knowing what to tackle first when key processes are interconnected.


 


Other challenges of implementing a performance improvement plan enterprise-wide occur when performance management teams try to implement change on a large scale. Performance improvement is best accomplished by implementing small changes, mastering a particular process to achieve those changes and identifying the next change that will lead to further performance improvements.


The best way to ensure that your organization is constantly improving and identifying relevant areas for improvement is by involving all employees, from top management down. Most often, negative performance is a result of one or more of the following factors, and is best resolved when all levels of the organization participates:



  • Unclear team/job responsibilities

  • Unclear or lack of performance feedback

  • Inadequate physical environment, including improper tools, supplies, or workspace

  • Lack of motivation and incentives to perform as expected

  • Skills and knowledge required for the job

  • Ineffective processes


Lifecycle Performance Improvement is an eleven step, systematic methodology for identifying weaknesses and the root causes of performance problems, and implementing a solution that applies to those specific performance deficits.


1. Review organizational goals and objectives


Identify/review performance measures (quantity, quality, cost or timeliness) that focus on these objectives


 


2. Define desired results for the processes


As guidance, focus on results needed by other domains (e.g., products or services needed by internal or external customers). Performance baselines are a good place to start to determine reasonable targets.


 


3. Measure performance and document results


Ensure that report parameters and formulas are well documented and consistent as these measures are revisited throughout the performance improvement process.


 


4. Compare the actual results to the desired results


This gives you an idea of how much work you have ahead of you. The further the actual results are from the desired performance the greater the performance gap.


 


5. Weigh/prioritize the measures that need improvement


Some criteria that may be useful to consider are value of metric, organizational impact, ease of implementing improvement measures, time restraints, etc.


 


6. Identify other areas of weakness


Often times, investigation of a performance gap will lead you to other weaknesses, which contribute to that gap in performance. In fact, major cross-functional processes are often low performing because of an underlying or sometime unrelated area of weakness.


 


7. Identify root causes of performance gap


This step involves identifying situations which consume resources, adversely affect the organization, and tend to be repetitive, causing action to eliminate the problem so the situation does not occur again. Root cause analysis (RCA) is a method that identifies causal factors, including interpersonal bottlenecks and dysfunctions that keep a business from achieving financial success. There are several ways to outline root causes. Answering the following questions can aid in identifying root causes:



  • Why did this event happen?

  • What occurred to create it?

  • What occurred prior?

  • What occurred following?

  • What is the significance of the event with respect to customer?

  • Who allowed this condition to exist?

  • Who was supervising this activity?

  • When did it occur?

  • Where (physical location, environmental condition)?

  • How did this condition originate?


Once the root cause is determined then it has to be determined whether it costs more to remove the root cause or continue to treat the symptoms. In a performance improvement setting, removing the root cause is preferred, but again, organizational objectives are the main influence on this decision.


 


8. Identify solutions


This step involves developing a performance improvement plan based on the organization’s weaknesses and root causes. This is where an organization maps out its plan to achieve the desired results, measures and standards that were previous unattainable. The root cause analysis performed in the previous step should assist identifying the best solution for each performance gap.


 


9. Implement solutions


Well, the hard part is finished. You’ve identified your problems and determined their root causes. You’ve generated numerous alternative solutions, and you’ve chosen the best alternative. If the solution is complicated, or if it requires a lot of work to implement, it might be best to prepare an action plan outlining the necessary steps to be taken. This plan may indicate who is responsible for each action, the target date for completing them, and available resources.


 


10. Exchange feedback


This is an ongoing process that is often undervalued. Continuous feedback can sometimes enable an organization to identify root causes long before they become problematic. But remember, feedback can only be effective if the organization acts on some of those suggestions.


 


11. Monitor and evaluate feedback


This is the most important step and extends throughout the entire performance improvement process. This is where you determine the effectiveness of the performance improvement plan. Monitoring and evaluation shows progress, problems and achievements against your goal and objectives. Monitor and evaluation stages help you:



  • make decisions and recommendations about future directions

  • identify the strengths and weaknesses of performance

  • enable judgments to be made about the worth of the measurement

  • determine the rate and level of attainment of the objectives

  • maintain accountability.


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Victor Holman is a Business Performance Expert and CEO of Lifecycle Performance Professionals.  His Business Done For You Service helps small business owners level the playing field with larger, higher budget competitors by delivering high performance marketing, management and social media solutions that build credibility and expert status, and generate steady leads and increased profits.


Get FREE ACCESS to his highly acclaimed Insider’s Secrets Club, which provides the latest business growth tools and strategies to explode your income.


Get a FREE Performance Management Kit at http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com/Free-Stuff/free-kit.html


Visit Victor at www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com or www.victorholman.com today



11 Steps to Improving Performance Through Data Collection and Gap Analysis

Monday, November 4, 2013

The Impact of Performance Management on Key Organizational Functions


Lifecycle-Performance-FrameworkPerformance management is the foundation of any organization that has a vision and knows where they want to be in the near and long term future. As today’s rapidly evolving business environment challenges organizations to adapt to constant change, the need for organizations to be sure that their projects and activities are aligned with overall strategic goals and business objectives is critical. Performance management is the gauge that lets you know whether or not you are reaching strategic goals and which areas within your service delivery could use improvement. It used to be that performance was isolated to one department. Today, every division within an organization can benefit from it. Performance management spans across various management functions and helps ensure that your people, processes and technology are working together to achieve your organization’s missions and goals. This article illustrates how performance management relates to various major management support functions within your organization.


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Strategic Planning


Strategic planning is the process of determining a company’s long-term goals and then identifying the best approach for achieving them. Strategic planning plays a vital role in the performance of your organization. In order for strategic goals to be achieved, strategic planning must be aligned to performance measurements. These performance measurements allow executive management to gauge the effectiveness of the organizational strategic plan and determine how the budget and projects will be setup in the future. The strategic planning process is discussed in more detail in the planning phase.


Organizational Development


Often used interchangeably with organizational effectiveness, organizational development is the process through which an organization develops the internal capacity to be the most efficient towards its mission work and to sustain itself over the long term. This definition highlights the explicit connection between organizational development work and the achievement of organizational mission. Performance management directly relates to organizational development, since OD is primarily focused on improving the performance of organizations and the people within them. Whatever your organizational challenges, the starting point is to get a clear, objective view of your organization’s performance abilities, such as strengths and limitations. Identifying proper performance attributes is essential, because sound management decisions can only be made when performance attributes are identified and measured accurately. In order to reach anticipated organizational targets, you must be able to tie the performance and motivation of individuals to the overall strategic objectives. The Lifecycle Performance Framework processes illustrate how performance management, organizational development and strategic planning share interrelated processes to accomplish organizational goals. Organizational development processes are discussed in more detail in the planning and execution phases.


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Change Management


Change management is a systematic approach to dealing with change within every perspective of an organization, from systems to personnel to projects to functions. Change management is a comprehensive, often difficult management function to properly implement. There’s the saying “Organizations don’t adapt to change; their people do.” With that outlook, it is easy to understand how performance management plays a critical part in managing change. Implementing change within an organization often requires a change in how employees execute things. You can implement the most advanced change management tools money can buy, but if your people don’t buy into or fully support the initiatives, their performance will suffer and ultimately the organization will be ineffective, or less efficient than before.


Every system, personnel, and procedural change within an organization should be implemented with the goal of achieving an improvement in performance some form. The actual improvement should be compared to the predicted improvement to assess the effectiveness of the change. This guide discusses managing your organization during its many changes throughout the performance lifecycle.


Project Management


Project management is the discipline of organizing and managing resources (e.g. people) in such a way that the project is completed within defined scope, quality, time and cost constraints. A project is a temporary and one-time endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service, which brings about beneficial change or added value. Performance measurement is an area within the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). It is the link between performance management and project management, where cost, schedule and scope performance are measured and monitored throughout each phase of the Project Lifecycle. Project performance reporting is the process of collecting project baseline data and distributing performance information to stakeholders throughout the project. Implementing project performance measurement ensures that your reporting clarifies how resources are being used to obtain the objectives of the project. Measuring project performance is discussed in detail in the monitoring phase.


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Customer Satisfaction


Customer satisfaction is the measurement or determination that a product or service meets a customer’s expectations, based on predetermined quality and service requirements. It is said that customer satisfaction equals perception of performance divided by expectation of performance. There is a direct relationship between performance and customer satisfaction, where the better you perform to customer expectations, the more satisfied customers will be. Customer satisfaction is your organization’s level of performance through your customers, employees, and/or stakeholders perspective. In fact, many times customer satisfaction feedback, if requested properly, can provide information and insight for achieving breakthrough increases in organizational performance and effectiveness. When measuring customer satisfaction, organizations should review their objectives and ensure that the customer service strategy is linked to those objectives. How to ensure that your organizational objectives are linked to your customer service strategy are discussed in the reporting phase.


Workforce Performance Management


Workforce performance management is the strategic alignment of an organization’s human capital with its business activities. It is a methodical process of analyzing the current workforce, determining future workforce needs, identifying the gap between the present and future, and implementing solutions so the organization can accomplish its mission, goals, and objectives.


People are the most important aspect to any organization. Therefore, the performance of the people within an organization will greatly impact the overall performance of the organization. While most employees understand what they need to do, workforce performance management tells them how well they must do it. The greatest benefit to workforce performance management is the process of aligning employee performance to organizational objectives and goals. This guide explains how to evaluate individuals on their alignment with corporate goals and their contributions to business results in the planning section. Functions within workforce performance management are Recruit and Hire Management, Compensation Management, Incentive Management, Goals Management, Learning Management, Competency Management, and Performance Measurement. These functions are described in the executing phase.


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IT Performance Management


IT performance management assists organizations with the increasing demands of maximizing value creation from technology investments, reducing risk from IT, decreasing architectural complexity, and optimizing overall technology expenditures. Behind people, technology is the next critical factor in maximizing efficiency and organizational performance. Many organizations from small to large are using IT strategically to support profitable growth. IT performance management includes maximizing technology to improve service delivery in every area of the organization. IT performance management utilizes such technology as unified management reporting and dashboard tools to enhance performance and drives business processes. How to find the right technologies to enhance your business intelligence, and choosing the right business intelligence tools are discussed in detail in the reporting phase.


Knowledge Management


Knowledge management refers to the guidelines, policies, and practices that an organization uses to create and transfer information to support the performance of the people in the organization. These can include various documents and copyrights, and intangible processes, models and methods that their people use to get work done. The impact of knowledge management on key business results is seen through its potential for improving the performance of business processes. Take call centers for example. They may handle hundreds, even thousands of calls a day. It would be too much too ask for call center representatives to be able to resolve the majority of these calls without a knowledge management system in place. With a knowledge management system, the call center representatives have more information and resources to access and can thus resolve more customer requests. Performance benefits can be seen in such areas as first call resolution, time to resolve, and customer satisfaction. Knowledge management drives performance by linking knowledge to critical functions which impact business and putting the supports in place to ensure knowledge is leveraged across people and circumstances.


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Quality Management


Quality management is a method for ensuring that all the activities necessary to design, develop and implement a product or service are effective and efficient with respect to the system and its performance. Quality management includes several processes that enable organizations to ensure quality. Among them are quality planning, quality assurance, quality control, quality audits and quality surveillance. Quality planning is defined as a set of activities whose purpose is to define quality system policies, objectives, and requirements, and to explain how these policies will be applied, how these objectives will be achieved, and how these requirements will be met. It is always future oriented. Quality assurance (QA) is defined as a set of activities whose purpose is to demonstrate that an entity meets all quality requirements. QA activities are carried out in order to inspire the confidence of both customers and managers, confidence that all quality requirements are being met.


Quality control is defined as a set of activities or techniques whose purpose is to ensure that all quality requirements are being met. In order to achieve this purpose, processes are monitored and performance problems are solved. Quality audits examine the elements of a quality management system in order to evaluate how well these elements comply with quality system requirements. Quality surveillance is a set of activities whose purpose is to monitor an entity and review its records to prove that quality requirements are being met. Performance measurement is a necessary instrument for quality management because in order to measure quality, you must first apply performance expectations and standards. In the PMBOK, the performance measurement process group falls under the quality management knowledge area. Quality management is discussed in greater detail in the monitoring phase.


Process Improvement


Process improvement is a series of actions taken to identify, analyze and improve existing processes within an organization to meet new goals and objectives. There are many process improvement methodologies that differ in approach, but the one thing they all have in common is the outcome of better performance. In fact, by definition performance improvement is the concept of measuring the output of processes or procedures, then modifying the processes or procedures in order to increase the output, increase efficiency, or increase the effectiveness of the processes or procedures. Often times, the most critical processes that impact business success are those that require support from multiple functional groups. Identifying and managing cross-functional processes and removing the functional silos that inhibit business culture are discussed in great detail in the planning and executing phases.


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Victor Holman is a Business Performance Expert and CEO of Lifecycle Performance Professionals.  His Business Done For You Service helps small business owners level the playing field with larger, higher budget competitors by delivering high performance marketing, management and social media solutions that build credibility and expert status, and generate steady leads and increased profits.


Get FREE ACCESS to his highly acclaimed Insider’s Secrets Club, which provides the latest business growth tools and strategies to explode your income.


Get a FREE Performance Management Kit at http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com/Free-Stuff/free-kit.html


Visit Victor at www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com or www.victorholman.com today




The Impact of Performance Management on Key Organizational Functions

Friday, November 1, 2013

Why Your Organization May Need a Performance Improvement Strategy...

It is believed that having the right metrics can only get you 80% of the way to an effective performance metrics program. The last 20% comes from deploying the metrics, seeing how they affect performance, and then adjusting them accordingly. The same can be said about the areas which these metrics guide. One of the main reasons we measure performance is so that we can identify weaknesses and areas of improvements. What we do once we identify these weaknesses and areas of improvement is what determines how effective our performance initiative, and in turn, organization will be.


 


The purpose of performance improvement is not to point fingers and place blame on a group or individuals that are not performing well, nor is it intended to solve problems. Performance improvement is simply a way of looking at how an organization can perform better. The difficulty with performance improvement, especially in an enterprise organization, is understanding which processes are working well and which aren’t and knowing what to tackle first when key processes are interconnected.


 


Other challenges of implementing a performance improvement plan enterprise-wide occur when performance management teams try to implement change on a large scale. Performance improvement is best accomplished by implementing small changes, mastering a particular process to achieve those changes and identifying the next change that will lead to further performance improvements.


 


The best way to ensure that your organization is constantly improving and identifying relevant areas for improvement is by involving all employees, from top management down. Most often, negative performance is a result of one or more of the following factors, and is best resolved when all levels of the organization participates:



  • Unclear team/job responsibilities

  • Unclear or lack of performance feedback

  • Inadequate physical environment, including improper tools, supplies, or workspace

  • Lack of motivation and incentives to perform as expected

  • Skills and knowledge required for the job

  • Ineffective processes



Take control of your organization’s performance and join the elite group of high performing organizations.


 


About Victor Holman



Victor Holman is a Business Performance Expert and CEO of Lifecycle Performance Professionals.  His Business Done For You Service helps small business owners level the playing field with larger, higher budget competitors by delivering high performance marketing, management and social media solutions that build credibility and expert status, and generate steady leads and increased profits.


 


Get FREE ACCESS to his highly acclaimed Insider’s Secrets Club, which provides the latest business growth tools and strategies to explode your income.


http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com/Free-Stuff/free-insiders-secrets-club-signup.html




Get a FREE Performance Management Kit at http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com/Free-Stuff/free-kit.html



Why Your Organization May Need a Performance Improvement Strategy...