InetSoft Webinar: Number Four – Failing to Deploy Performance Measurements Beyond Senior Management

This is the continuation of the transcript on "Top Ten Business Intelligence Mistakes” hosted by InetSoft. The speaker is Christopher Wren, Principal Consultant at TFI Consulting.

Number four, most organizations don’t deploy their performance measures beyond senior management. They look at this as a management tool that is for the vice presidents, the director, and people in higher ranking and get together once a month and look at how we’re doing as a company.

But the organizations that have really had success with this have cascaded performance measures all the way down to the very bottom so that the worker, the person who’s doing the front line job, has their own little scorecard to look at to say how am I doing at my job, am I a bus boy or am I the guy doing the cabs out in front of the hotel. 

Everybody needs to have their own way to measure their performance. If you are showing them, well, here’s how the Bellagio did last month and the guy’s a waiter in the restaurant, his eyes are going to glaze over. He could care less how the Bellagio did although it might be interesting. I guess you guys made a lot of money and you know I didn’t do so well on tips but he needs to know how he did. 

So cascading this all the way down takes a lot of work, takes a lot of meetings, takes a lot of effort but until you do that, you are not going to get the needles to move much because most of the work is done down at the bottom, not up at the top.

So the idea behind these performance measures is to drive behavior, to drive change in performance. So everybody needs to have a dashboard and there have only been a few companies I’ve worked with over the years that have cascaded it all the way down and most of them have been small and medium sized companies because it's easier to do if you have 90 employees. If you have 90,000 that’s a little bit tougher. So that’s number four.