Information is a valuable, if intangible, asset for organisations alongside people, money and buildings as it provides the insight and understanding essential to effective decision-making. Clearly performance information has its limitations and can never be fully accurate or provide a complete picture of what is happening. But without the transparency it provides our understanding of organisational performance would be considerably impaired.
There is an extensive range of literature on how to develop performance indicators and performance frameworks that will help an organisation track its performance successfully. Our experience is that the key to success is to work closely with each organisation to correctly identify the factors critical to its success and then design a suite of a few key measures to track them. The factors vary between organisations but they are likely to include the management of resources and assets (eg money, people, facilities), key organisational competencies (eg leadership, partnership working, project management, case management etc), aspects of service delivery such as quality, customer satisfaction, results achieved and ultimate outcomes. It is also important to consider how the performance information will be used. The most important role is of performance information is to improve transparency. There may be a case for setting targets but organisations need to be careful to avoid constraining performance to sub-optimal levels or setting in train perverse incentives and game-playing.
The importance of timely and accurate business information is now generally understood.but many organisations still lack the systems they need for monitoring and tracking performance. Organisations often seek external assistance when designing and implementing a new performance framework both to provide an additional temporary resource and to draw on specialist expertise. There is also an increasing demand for external specialist advice where there is dissatisfaction with existing performance frameworks or measures. This may arise from internal disagreement on how best to track performance or where there are doubts over the usefulness and reliability of the performance measures currently used.
We have supported a number of organisations with both the development of completely new performance frameworks and reviewing the design and operation of existing frameworks. This has included advice on data-gathering and validation, technical and business evaluation of existing indicators, design of new performance measures and assistance with implementation including preparation of guidance notes and development of software applications.