Posts

Shannon, try this for more food for thought:

How to Measure Policy Advice

We should aspire to make anything that we want to improve measurable. If it isn’t measurable, then it’s not observable. If we can’t observe it, we won’t know if it’s happening or not. If we can’t tell if it’s happening or not, then what’s the point of trying to improve it? This is a paraphrase of Douglas Hubbard’s clarification chain.

I’m excited for Attempt #2 also, Joscelyn. It sounds like you’re off to a strong start with your Measures Team. And probably like other PuMP Community members, I’m very keen to hear more of your solutions for a geographically spread out Measures Team.

David, basically the green layer in the Results Map is where you capture the strategic, corporate-wide results implied by the corporate goals. Corporate strategy is usually cascaded, which means that each “part” of the organisation then examines how they need to change or improve to help the organisation achieve those corporate goals. And so each “part” of the organisation sets its own goals and these go into the blue layer. These goals are often about business process outcomes or functional outcomes. Then the orange layer in the results map contains the next level of cascading, where teams will identify their contribution to achieving the blue level results.

More on cascading here: https://www.staceybarr.com/measure-up/2-ways-to-cascade-a-measurable-strategy-that-creates-alignment/

This is not a perfect science, but rather a way to acknowledge and clarify that in complex systems like organisations, there isn’t just a single logical level of goals. Goals will live in hierarchical or systemic relationships to one another.

And be careful with cascading “strategies”. These are often change initiatives, or actions to achieve the corporate goals. Sometimes these will suggest the process or functional outcomes that should be in the blue layer (or sometimes the orange layer), but we don’t cascade strategies. Instead we link them to the result in the Results Map that they are designed to achieve.

Richard, glad you noticed. I wrote the book back in 2016, but since then we have tested swapping Steps 6 and 7 around, based on some confusion people were having with learning reporting before XmR charts. This confusion went away during our test, and so now Step 6 in PuMP is about XmR charts and Step 7 is about designing performance reports (which contain XmR charts).

Fran, try this as a starting point: “a performance target is a level of performance we are aiming to reach in the future.” This is from my blog post https://www.staceybarr.com/measure-up/what-are-benchmarks-baselines-targets-and-standards/

We want to avoid targets being about numbers to hit each week or month or year. The best targets are ones that describe a level of performance that is better than we are currently able to produce, with whatever process design or resource levels we currently have. Great targets inspire us to lift that level of performance, by improving or streamlining or redesigning our processes or resource use.

And targets need to give us time for that change to happen. So good targets are set for the future, and we use XmR charts to visualise our progress toward that future. We look for signals in the XmR chart to tell us we are indeed changing performance, and that we’re doing it fast enough to reach our target by the date we set it for in the future.

And we need to watch out for the psychology of targets too. Missing a target is not a bad thing, because we either lifted performance at least somewhat higher than it was, or we learned about the type of change that doesn’t work. And we then set a new target and try again.

And a bunch more on targets here: https://www.staceybarr.com/?s=targets

Manon, I’m looking forward to seeing your XmR tool. The feature that I think is important is that the user can set the recalculation start and end points, when they see a signal. Automating this can be dangerous!

Excellent progress, Joscelyn! Thanks for sharing it here with us. It’s always great to see the different approaches people take to their PuMP Pilots. There isn’t one correct way! The best way is the one that keeps momentum and builds engagement.

Roy, I loved meeting you too. Your energy is great to be around. As you tackle that challenge to rule out all the bad habits on KPIs in ABN AMRO, please do share some things you find work well. Even the smallest success is inspirational and practical for us all!

Great to hear this, Janet. Can’t believe it’s been 10 years already. Might we get a few more case studies from you? Let me know if you’re keen and my team will arrange a time for me to interview you.

Ayca, this is great. You’re taking a very wise approach, and I very much appreciate your honesty with your client about not being a licensed PuMP Partner yet. Please do stay in touch with me through out this. I think you’d be a good role model for other consultants wanting to use PuMP. Looking forward to your case studies too!