Vital Signs, Scorecards, and Goals: The Power of Meaningful Measurement

Most organizations fail to use the right measures to measure the right things. Most often, attempts are made to use organizational or business unit level metrics, and analytics, to diagnose process level problems and monitor process health – an approach that is often ineffective for identifying key improvement areas. Organizations also fail to engage enough team members in daily measure use to improve work processes. In turn, most measurement systems are waste laden and provide suboptimal value. Examples of measurement system waste include using too many lagging counts as measures, measuring only at the site or department level, and using measurement as a hammer to punish poor performers instead as a predictive and diagnostic tool. Thirty years of experimentation, research, application, and process refinement has helped the author identify, and build into this book, a variety of key measurement system best practices and strategies to help you create a leaner, more value added measurement system. How meaningful is your measurement system?