Practical help with KPIs, measures and reporting
My local taxi company has been taken over. It has been bought out by Taxi-Rank Services PLC. They have started to apply big business thinking to a small business. It is a revelation. As you know, “what gets measured gets managed” so the first job, post take-over, was to apply a little science to their [...]
I had an interesting conversation with a company lawyer a little while ago. We were discussing dashboards and she said “It makes me laugh when people talk about dashboards, it is just a posh way of describing a report!”. It made me think as it seems to be a common misconception. What is the difference between [...]
It’s hard to believe, but many companies still see the data they collect as “a drain on IT systems” I really recommend reading this item on the couple behind the Tesco Clubcard scheme. It’s a brilliant tale of using high quality data to give a huge competitive advantage (“it is estimated that since its introduction [...]
There’s something curious happens when you write a number down. It somehow becomes “official”. I realised this a few years ago when haggling for rugs in India. The traders would write down the figure on a piece of paper and show it to you when you were haggling. I naively assumed this was to avoid [...]
Like 4.6 million other people, I enjoy Spooks. I do find myself wincing a bit when Harry, or whoever, makes completely random requests of his spy geeks and they always come up with the goods – you know the kind of thing – “can you cross reference that train ticket with his gardening bill and [...]
At one point in the late 1980s, the then president of Ashton-Tate (Esber was CEO) proclaimed that every product would need to bring in at least 10% of the company’s revenue or be dropped. This statement had the immediate effect of limiting the company to 10 products or fewer. Further, with dBASE bringing in about [...]
I tend to get sore skin if I shave with the wrong type of shaving gel. I’ve finally found a shaving gel that works (Nivea for Men, Sensitive, in case you are asking). What the hell has this got to do with KPIs? Well you can buy at least a dozen different brands of shaving [...]
Here is a process improvement idea for you. It is called “poke yoke”. I am told that that is Japanese for “making things easy to get right and difficult to get wrong”. It is a rather grand name for what my old boss used to call “idiot proofing”. Let me give you an example: think [...]
Many KPIs and targets can be an invitation for creative dishonesty. How do you make sure you don’t accidentally drive self defeating behaviours?
I’d like to ban pie charts. I know it’s a bit over the top, but I honestly can’t see a single thing they do better than other graph type (like a 100% stacked bar). They are also hopeless at lots of other things, namely: You can’t trend with them. Yes, you can put [...]
