What Gets Measured, Gets Done.

Measure what you do

Performance measurement

In the above image you can see the dancers performing synchronously. Imagine they are doing that with out practice and a plan of action. Imagine they dancing with out measured movements, can they achieve this level of perfection and artistic composition? No. 

They have their own measures which tell them are they there (desired goal) yet.

Performance measurement is measuring what ever you do. For example you use gadgets to track your health and body movements. It tells you how many steps you have run and how much calories are burnt. This will give you an indication of how much you have achieved on your personnel goal and how much more you have to go. In another perspective are you still in the right direction or are you straying away.

If you are straying away, it means your not doing thigs the proper way or not doing enough. If all is well you can simply raise the bar and achieve more in given time. Stary aways from target is called strategic drift.

Performance measurement is critical in achieving goals for several reasons:

1. Tracking progress: 

Performance measurement provides a way to track progress towards achieving a specific goal. By measuring performance, you can determine whether you are on track to meet your targets or whether you need to make adjustments to your strategies. I wanted to make  ₹1 million sales in the current month. After I review sales data I understood that I could only clock ₹25 Lakhs of sales by the third week of the month. Which means I should app the marketing game to gain a 0.75 Million sales in one week.

One thing is I failed to measure my sales at appropriate time intervals. Another thing is I know why can't I make this sale in time because I have a measure with me to indicate that.

2. Identifying areas for improvement: Performance measurement allows you to identify areas that need improvement. Once you know which areas are not performing well, you can take steps to improve them and bring them up to the desired level of performance. In one of my personnel example. My client been doing well with sales. Having a monthly turn over of one million for a startup, but every month at salary payments and all those overheads come and strangle them real tight. How it is happening even with 50% net profit? Their customers won't pay in time and my client is having a liquidity problem. The situation is called overtrading. Which we will discuss separately. So here we have to measure the credit worthiness of clients, track payments, receivable days and implement techniques to improve account receivable collection.

3. Motivation: Performance measurement can be a powerful motivator for individuals and teams. When people see that they are making progress towards their goals, they are more likely to stay motivated and continue working towards achieving them. This calls for another personnel example. During my studies, my tutor keep telling us "What gets measured gets done" . He always give us simple tests and use tools to give us proof our improvement. It was a great motivating factor for us because we knew we are moving forward. That feeling can reap great results. Another quote of my tutor to remember here is "Power of 1% change", this idea can be demonstrated mathematically.

4. Accountability: Performance measurement also helps create accountability. By setting clear targets and measuring progress towards those targets, individuals and teams are held accountable for their performance. This create an atmosphere of responsibility towards goals and it can motivate teams to align their personnel goals with that of the organization.

5. Strategic decision making: Performance measurement can inform strategic decision making. By analyzing performance data, you can identify trends and patterns that can help you make informed decisions about where to invest resources and how to allocate them most effectively. 

Measuring also means you are managing something with clarity and and definition rather than something vague and undefined. You exactly get to know what you have monitor, control and enable. 

One important consideration you need here is the term 'measure' and the activity of 'measurement' is usually considered a number thing, but in most contemporary scenarios do not align with that notion. Throwing numbers on paper does not always gives you desired results of performance measurements. We also need to consider qualitative aspects surrounding a decision case. It's a balancing act of our two parts of brain. We need give weightage to qualitative aspects which are immeasurable most time. We know when we buy dress or accessories we rank our choices based own our taste, even if we could put rank to it, the basis of that rank is purely subjective yet it makes complete sense, don't they?

So pure number crunch or a blind shot alone won't do it. It is the combination. That's where the mettle of manager needs proving. 

Reminds me of my Dart board game, neither my calculated shots nor the blind ones land in bulls eye, but I never gave up. Still throwing.

See you soon.