Search results for: “davidparmenter.com”


  • 28 generic KPIs to help your organisation outperform expectations

    By David Parmenter To work out what your KPIs should be you need first to work out what your five to eight most important critical success factors are.  Critical success factors (CSFs) are operational issues or aspects that need to be accomplished day-in/day-out by the staff in the organization. Lets assume you want the right staff to…

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  • The nine characteristics of successful KPI implementations

    From my observations the failure rate for KPI and balance scorecard projects is off the scale.  Key Performance Indicators, in many organisations are dysfunctional and thus a broken tool. Measures are often a random collection, prepared with little expertise, thus signifying nothing.  KPIs should be measures that link daily activities to the organisation’s critical success…

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  • 15 tasks to a KPI project

    By David Parmenter After 30 years helping organizations ascertain their Critical Success Factors and associated KPIs, I have come up with 15 steps to start a KPI project. These steps are explained in detail in my best selling KPI book which can be accessed from leading book sellers. The most up to date reference work is in…

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  • An overview of how to generate KPIs for your organisation (a three-stage process)

     Exhibit from David Parmenter’s Key Performance Indicators (4th Edition)  An overview of how to generate KPIs for your organisation (a three-stage process) By David Parmenter Many organizations that have operated with key performance indicators (KPIs) have found the KPIs made little or no difference to performance. In many cases this was due to a fundamental misunderstanding…

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  • The 9 Myths Why KPIs Do Not Work

    By David Parmenter Key performance indicators (KPIs) in many organizations are a broken tool. Measures are often a random collection prepared with little expertise, signifying nothing. KPIs should be measures that link daily activities to the organization’s critical success factors (CSFs), thus supporting an alignment of effort within the organization in the intended direction. Here…

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  • 4 reasons why you might wish to abandon your broken KPIs

    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…

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  • 4 reasons why cascading measures down from strategic initiatives will never work

    By David Parmenter Cascading measures down an organization was probably the most damaging process used in the balanced scorecard approach. There are four reasons why it does not and will never work: The answer lies with the critical success factors Having first ascertained the organization’s CSFs it is thus best to start the balanced scorecard from the…

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  • 3 ways KPIs can transform your business

    By David Parmenter Here are three ways that can help you transform your business. Performance measures communicate what needs to be done and help staff understand what is required. They enable leaders to give the general direction and let the staff make the daily decisions to ensure progress is made appropriately. This shift to training and…

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  • The four types of performance measures

    From my research over the past 30 years I have come to the conclusion that there are four types of performance measures, and thus it is a myth to consider all measures as KPIs. These four measures are in two groups: result indicators and performance indicators. I use the term result indicators to reflect the fact that…

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  • 5 KPIs to avoid and why every measure has a dark side

    By David Parmenter Unintended behaviour – the dark side of measures Measurement initiatives are often cobbled together without the knowledge of the organisation’s critical success factors and without an understanding of the behavioural consequences of a measure. Every performance measure has a dark side, a negative consequence, like the dark side of the moon.  The…

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