Measuring Performance

A Toolkit of Traditional and Alternative Methods

Do your performance measures seek primarily to detect and control undesirable activities, rather than sharing and rewarding productive behaviour? Every organisation needs to measure its performance and that of the people it employs; David Jenkins shows you how to make more productive use of such measures. For measures to be accurate and reliable there are fundamental rules that need to be applied. Ignoring or misapplying them undermines performance and impedes the achievement of the corporate goal. For any enterprise, data must be available across the whole spectrum of activity in which it is engaged. The quality of that information will depend on the way it is measured. In some commercial organisations data is regularly gathered at local level. Instead of being used at this point, it is often fed into a corporate information system which, having recycled it, issues the result in a form that does not always meet needs. In Measuring Performance, David Jenkins examines the more traditional measures of performance and highlights their shortcomings as well as assessing the merits of the alternative approaches that are currently available. The book concludes with a step-by-step guide to reviewing the effectiveness of your organisation's existing systems for measuring performance and identifying ways of improving them.