Performance Metrics: The Levers for Process Management

Which performance measures should you use? The obvious answer is that it depends on what you want to achieve, which someone else should never define for you. After all, it is your organization, your department, or your process.

But once you are clear about what you want to accomplish, how do you sort through a variety of possible metrics and decide which are best? Then, given the list of metrics you believe are useful or necessary, how do you define them in more detail to ensure that the right data are gathered at the appropriate frequency and that the resulting information gets to the right people so that they can make proper decisions?

This book provides a clarifying perspective for those who know that metrics need to be developed but are unsure as to the steps to follow in developing and deploying them. It focuses on making sure that the metrics selected will guide people and processes in the direction the organization wants to go, and allow continual evaluation of success.

Every highly effective organization is unique in some strategic way, and the metrics used should reflect these differences. Studying high performers can be useful from a learning standpoint, but simply adopting what someone else is doing is likely to take you off your track and put you on theirs. The concepts in Performance Metrics: The Levers for Process Management will put you on the correct track and give you the tools to stay on it.

April Michelle Davis spent several weeks analyzing the text and writing the index for this book.