Number of Measures

Performance measurement systems are nothing new. Organizations have a plethora of measures available through numerous reports. Careful study often indicates that many organizations have too many measures, with numerous redundancies. Many of these measures are tracked for dubious reasons. One company in the survey stated that measures were tracked “because we've always tracked them.” Exhibit 8.3 shows that while most organizations track 50 or fewer measures, a significant quantity of Adopters track many times that number of measures.

Exhibit 8.3: Number of Measures Tracked by Adopters

Exhibit 8.4 shows that most organizations use less than half of their tracked measures on their scorecards.

Exhibit 8.4: Percentage of Tracked Measures Used as Part of Scorecard System

When an organization that already has a key performance indicator (KPI) system rolls out a scorecard system, it needs to tie them together. Otherwise it will give rise to questions such as, “Why are utilization rates, efficiency rate, and so forth on my KPI report, but not my scorecard?” Employees will manage the measures on which they are evaluated and/or compensated. It is therefore necessary to ensure that the two systems are linked.

The City of Boston tracks 1,000 measures and reports on them monthly. ...

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