Making Your Targets Achievable…Its about Progress not Perfection!

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Bob Champagne

As I was relaxing over the weekend watching the ATT Pro-Am, where more than a few players (and celebs) entered the final day well within contention. There are many golfers that are entering 2011 in good form for so early in the year, and while there was only one winner, there were at least a dozen players (from the 40-somethings like Phil and VJ to the cadre of “young guns” that appear to have come out of nowhere and are now taking center stage) within striking distance when the day started on Sunday.

As it turned out, the winning team was in fact one of those young guns(D.A. Points), who ironically stood beside his celebrity playing partner- not other than the “old fart” we all remember from caddy shack, Mr Bill Murray himself. And what a finish it was.

But what was interesting about this day was that there were so many guys playing great golf, and who had clearly taken there game to the next level. It was kind of odd listening to the Mickelson (after mucking up a few key holes that likely cost him a come from behind win), describe the tournament as “really fun” and his play as “much improved”. Sure, anyone making tens of millions a year could probably maintain that attitudeafter “letting one slip away”. But I actually watched that interview thinking the guy was genuine. In my view, good athletes get where are not only through hard work and unwavering commitment, but also by recognizing and reinforcing the principle of improvement as much as they do the actual win.

As you read the below post, I encourage you to think about how you can apply this principle to your periodic goal setting process, whether its setting new goals or negotiating mid course corrections. I hope you enjoy what I believe is some pretty timeless advice.

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From my previous post “PROGRESS, NOT PERFECTION”…

Good performance managers can separate the “aspiration” from the “journey” toward it. Notice I said “toward it”, and not “to it”. Performance Management is a process, not and end game. It’s a journey “toward” a state of perfection, knowing that you may never fully achieve it. It’s working damn hard at something knowing that you never really graduate or declare a perfect ending. There’s always something else to aspire to. Our job as performance managers is to manage the process or the journey, using the “end game” only as a beacon that you navigate toward.

To some of you, this may contradict one of my earlier writings on ‘not accepting mediocrity’. In fact, there is a contradiction, and it’s by design. Goal setting is an art, always trying to find the balance between being too ambitious, but at the same time, not accepting mediocrity. Good goal setting will stretch the capabilities of the individual without demoralizing them with repeated failure. For example, an organization may aspire to six sigma performance standards, but manage the process in a way that reinforces and rewards milestones along the way. And when you’re at six sigma, there’s still something to aspire to.

Think about the game of golf. Hogan once said that man will never play a perfect round of golf, because of the nature of the game. Think about it. A perfect score of 18 is beyond human reach in the game as we know it (a hole in one on every hole). Hogan also said that when he plays a round of golf, he can expect only a handful of shots to go exactly as he planned them. Wow! Now that’s amazing. Here’s a world class golfer at his peak saying that out of 65-75 strokes, only 4 or 5 will pass his test of perfection.

But despite the fact that we’ll never achieve that perfect end state, the game of golf does challenge us with goals of par (what should a good golfer shoot), birdies, eagles, double eagles, and those rare but attainable hole in ones. The game’s scoring is also adjusted for a player’s handicap, which changes as his skill improves. There are not many sports that encourage and motivate players ‘toward’ a level of perfection, without ever fully achieving it, than the game of golf does.

So sticking with this analogy, how do golfers motivate themselves in a world where they’ll never fully achieve “perfection”? Most good golfers play each stroke, one at a time, putting a lot more focus on # of fairways hit, GIR’s (# greens hit in regulation), # of sand saves, # of up and downs, and average # of putts per green. That’s how they do it. They set meaningful and achievable milestones for the journey, knowing that if they achieve those, the final score will take care of itself. Turn on the TV every Sunday afternoon, and you’ll see it in action. Even if you don’t like golf, you can’t help but being impressed by how these guys and women manage their game (their journey).

If you like the above analogies and can relate to them, there are some great writings on the subject that will illustrate this point better than I ever could. Three that I recommend are “Golf is not a game of perfect”, “Life is not a game of perfect”, and “The golf of your dreams”, all written by Dr. Bob Rotella, a noted sports psychologist. While these may play more to the golfers among us, his style of writing lends itself to wide applications of these principles, from the workplace to life in general.

So as you set goals, and manage your people toward achieving them, remember to not only focus on the ‘end game’ or ultimate aspiration of perfection, but to also place an equal if not greater focus on the journey and the milestones we must achieve along the way.

-b

Author: Bob Champagne is Managing Partner of onVector Consulting Group, a privately held international management consulting organization specializing in the design and deployment of Performance Management tools, systems, and solutions. Bob has over 25 years of Performance Management experience and has consulted with hundreds of companies across numerous industries and geographies. Bob can be contacted at bob.champagne@onvectorconsulting.com

Managing YOUR Performance on Valentine’s Day

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Bob Champagne

I can’t believe I am getting caught up in the ‘linking of blog topics to holidays’, but after having some fun with the whole Suberbowl thing, I figured why not get caught up in today’s Valentines Day madness.

While Valentines day is positioned as a way to demonstrate your love, passion, and commitment to your significant other, I am convinced that all this was really created and perpetuated by a secret cartel of rose growers, flower shoppes, jewelery stores, restaurant owners, and chocolate retailers. But whoever is responsible for this madness, it’s still a big day that is full of expectations, and a day that most of us in committed relationships would be advised to “deliver on” effectively. And by “effectively”, I mean BEYOND expectation!

So how on earth am I going to connect Valentine’s day to the topic of performance management? Well, believe it or not, there are more than a few ways to make the “tie in”. For example, one is to do what most did with their Suberbowl blogs and simply focus on all of the statistics and trends around V-day, like $$ spent and volume of product purchases. But that would be too easy, and I suspect there will be more than enough of that on today’s blog sites and news reports.

Instead, I’ll focus on something that may actually yield some real value to you if you want to protect and nurture that relationship with your “main squeeze”, by providing you with a simple “performance framework” to make sure you get through the day with “everything” in tact.

Applying the basic principles of balanced scorecard and performance management, we’ll start with the “vision” and “mission”. One thing to remember when you develop a performance framework is that your vision and mission should always be viewed relative to the challenge you are trying to manage. But as a general rule, we view a vision from a longer term perspective, and a mission from a shorter term horizon.

So what is the the vision for our relationships with our significant other ? For the hopeless romantics in the crowd, the instinctive reaction would be to focus on big aspirations….things like “a long and happy life”, “to love, honour and cherish”, “to grow old together and die in each others arms”, and the myriad of other syrupy catch phrases that are there for the taking. For others, it might be something as simple as “a week without nagging” or “getting my husband to learn to ‘pick up’ after himself”. It’s all relative to your situation and ambition, and how far you are away from it. For now, we’ll stick to a vision geared to a “happy and healthy life with my loving spouse” (its a good common denominator for all of the above), along with some specificity about what that ‘looks like’ in terms of happiness, healthiness, etc…But since vision definition is not the main purpose here, I’ll leave it at that. You’ve got the idea.

Missions are generally shorter term in nature and focus on intermediate milestones in pursuit of the long term vision. For companies, they are still usually multi-year in nature, but for our purpose here, I’m going to break protocol and make the mission simply “getting through the big day”. Again, my purpose today is getting to a discussion of our specific objectives and KPI’s, not to do a tutorial on strategic planning. But it’s worth pointing out that, depending on where you stand (organizationally, timeframe wide, role etc), what looks like a mission to some, may feel like a strategy to others, and vice versa. Thinking about a mission from a military perspective helps me sometimes (and no, I’m not making a parallel between a military event and my marriage, although most of us could probably relate to that from time to time). Suffice it to say that missions are sometimes big, and sometimes small; may be shorter term or could be longer term. And while from the perspective of top leadership something might look like a tactic, troops may in fact view the very same thing as their “mission”. Its all context dependent.

So just for today, lets consider the mission as “getting through Valentines day 2011 with (as I said before), “everything in tact”-which for me, means not having to make apologies for my forgetfulness, incorrect gift choices, and if I’m lucky, a happy and grateful spouse who has embraced my gesture of appreciation.

Now, for the fun part, lets talk Objectives and KPI’s...In business, the balanced scorecard purists would say there are 4 basic categories (perspectives) within which our objectives, goals and KPI’s should be managed. These “big 4″ most often include: customer, financial, employee, and internal (operations and processes). Sure there are other variants of this…but let’s hang with these for now, and try and apply these to the “v-day specific” mission we defined above.

Again, the flow will be perspective–objective—and kpi’s ( the indicators through which we’ll measure our success).

I. Customer (Ms. Valentine)

For our application today, we’ll define “Ms or Mr Valentine as “the customer” in our little example. After all, it is their perspective that will make the determination of whether we “get through the day in tact”. So what are our objectives for today? Here are mine:

Objective 1: Avoid Disappointment (KPI: # of times Mr. Valentine says “Sh**, I forgot!!!” or “I wish i would have done…” to himself at any point throughout the day—2011 target=0)
Objective 2: Delight my Valentine (KPI: # of times the wife says “oh Bob, you shouldn’t have!!!” —2011 target=>2)
Objective 3: Demonstrate Sincerity ( KPI: # of verbal or non verbal signals suggesting that I “was just trying to make up for past screw ups”, or “trying to get an early jump on the objective below—2011 target=1 (its usually more than that :))
Objective 4: Generate “reciprocal appreciation” (KPI: Gestures of Reciprocal Appreciation- I’ll term these GRA’s for short (KPI and target =confidential!!! :)) —SPECIAL NOTE- be careful this one is not obvious, or you will jeapordize #3 above

II. Financial (Don’t break the bank)

Of course, achieving the above is easy if your resources are unlimited. But for most of us, be it money or time, it’s never that easy. So you’ll have to accomplish the above within your means and ability. Let’s try these:

Objective 1: Stay on Budget (supporting KPI’s: variance to planned budget—target=0 variance)
Objective 2: Maximize ROI of gift purchases (# GRA’s per $ of V-day investment—2011 target =also Confinential-i.e. providing target would provide clues as to the target of the GRA metric above)

III. Operational (Make the day run smoothly)

In any business, there are those things that are reflective of how streamlined or smoothly the operation or process performs. Personally, I see these as “level 2″ contributors to the “customer” and “financial” objectives, but they are no less important, and if they are not proactively managed, they will cause you to fail. A few of those that are pertinent to my success on my spouse’s special day include:

Objective 1: Ensure timeliness of delivery (KPI: Deviation from planned delivery times—2011 target= <+/- 15 minutes)
Objective 2: Spread the “joy” throughout the day – i.e. sometimes, lots of little surprises leading to the big one is best! (KPI: Interval between surprises—2011 target= 3 hours)
Objective 3: Time the big surprise well (KPI: be on time (for dinner, the big gift, etc…)—target =0 deviation from plan)…or else there may not be time for the GRA that may follow.

IV. Employees (Managing the Influencers and Stakeholders)

Over the last few decades, I have found that getting through the day can be quite challenging amidst the various distractions that can emerge. Thats why its important to arm yourself with some help. For me, there are three sources of that “help”, and each plays a valuable role in navigating the special day.

Objective 1: Keep the delivery guys happy- (KPI: generate one thank you from each delivery vendor—2011 target=100%)
Objective 2: Leverage the little ones…not only can your kids they help, but they can also be instrumental in “spreading the joy” throughout the day with small gifts or gestures of appreciation to mommy. The real objective here is simply to keep the day top of mind, and minimize forgetfulness and/ or unplanned delays (KPI: # Delays/ forgotten deliveries from the kids—target= <2 (their teenagers after all!))
Objective 3: Impress the “influencers” (KPI: # of relevant people the wife brags to (inlaws, friends, etc.)—2011target= 3)

Now there are clearly strategies and tactics that support each of these. In your company, these are the initiatives and investments that help you achieve all this. But for today, these will be little things like tipping the driver, timing your deliveries for maximum “optics” and co-worker recognition, setting your teenagers alarm clock…you get the idea.

And of course, there are the weightings for the objectives and KPI’s themselves. For example, you don’t want to overweight the financials, or else you may risk the GRA effect. Or overweighting the contribution of others (like your kids) may add unecesary risk to the equation, and could also jeopardize the sincerity objective. Again, use your judgement here.

But hey, isn’t that what building a performance measurement framework is like in real life? It’s both an art AND a science. And of course, there are the intangibles and things you just can’t track or keep score of . And often, especially for those who are single, you do need a competitive advantage. So be careful about everything you declare and put in writing (which may conflict with the advice of the balanced scorecard purists), or else you may risk your competetive advantage.

As I wrote this, I found myself sometimes getting sidetracked (duh…really?)…thinking about things like leading indicators, scenario modeling, gaming theory, contingency planning etc…so, lucky for you, I had to keep bringing myself back on point. Otherwise this could have really led down some interesting and wacky paths.

But hopefully, I’ve given you enough fodder to help keep your day on track, and “if your lucky”…Nevermind, I’ll leave it at that. Use your imagination, and good luck!

-b

Top 10 Directional Miscues In Implementing an EPM System…

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Bob Champagne

A COLLABORATIVE WORK-IN-PROCESS…

REQUESTED INPUT FROM ALL READERS

Today, I am starting work on an article on the subject of “why Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) initiatives fail. But rather than waxing eloquent on my personal past experiences, which I have droned on about over the last 5 years on this blog, I’ve decided to take a somewhat different direction. This time, I am going to build this around my readers direct experiences, a purely “from the front” line perspective, if you will.

I think this will be interesting from a few different angles:

First, by its very nature, any discussion of EPM will bring together what have emerged as disparate disciplines over the years: HR, IT, Strategic Planning, Corporate Performance, Budgeting, et al. I discussed the challenges of this at length a few days back in my post on “integrating and unifying performance management” . Bringing these perspectives together in one common dialogue will be refreshing, I think.
Second, it will not simply focus on reasons for failure, but specifically those “choice points” where taking a different path would have yielded a different result or avoided a key mistake- Implementation related “Moments of Truth” if you will.
Finally the result will be your’s, not that of one consulting trying to promote their own solutions (at least not directly), but rather a collection of perspectives from users, clients, and thought leaders, wherever they reside in the EPM value chain.

I’ll try not to “lead” or steer this too much, except to provide you a few broad categories to comment on. But I welcome you to add any other category or insight you feel would be useful. Some example areas to prime the pump so to speak, include:

Aligning managers and executives
defining the measurement architecture
building out the measurement framework
installing your EPM technology
involvement of HR and appraisal systems
cultural issues and choice points
integration with reward structures
etc..

In submitting your input, I’d like you to be brief, but as specific as possible. i.e. what was the choice involved? What were the paths you were considering? why you chose the one you did? what failure occurred as a result of your decision? what you believe the alternative path would have produced?

I’d like to see feedback from different perspectives: Executives to middle managers, Vendors to clients, “thought leaders” to employees at the “work face”- et al. The more perspectives we get the better.

You can post your comments below, or if you feel more comfortable sharing this in private, just DM me at @bobchampagne on twitter, and I will provide you with a way to get in touch with me to discuss further. I will synthesize over the coming days and weeks, but feel free to check back and follow the discussion here, on twitter, or wherever the conversation takes us. At the conclusion of the process, or perhaps during, we may elect to do a twitter style roundtable/ conference call if that is useful.

Thanks in advance for your input and participation. They say maximum learning is produced by studying, in depth, both your successes and failures. By exploring the pro’s and cons of various “directional” choices, my hope is that we can create another “step change” in how EPM solutions are designed and delivered.

-b

First things First- PROCESS before technology…

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Bob Champagne

Here is is post I wrote a few years back. I was reminded of it while on a call today on Sales Enablement and Automation. Not surprising that it always comes back to “doing the RIGHT things RIGHT”. BTW- an update on the below article- 3 years later, the process at EWR is STILL THE SAME!!!! ———————————

Here’s a brief story I encountered while leaving Newark International Airport following a recent business trip. Hard to believe, but true.

After a long flight home from the West Coast, I took a short train ride to the long term parking facility, located my car (which is becoming more difficult with age it seems), and proceeded to the parking exit. Note that it’s been a while since I’ve used the long term parking facility, as I normally use a car or taxi service, so I was largely unfamiliar with their new “high tech” customer solutions.

As I pulled up to the pay station (expecting the attendant to inform me of my charge), she immediately looked at me with the gaze of a very frustrated woman who’s obviously done this before. In a short tone, she barked out an instruction suggesting that I had passed an automated ticket booth, from which I should have inserted my ticket and noted the charge. I complied with the instruction, quietly wondering why this woman was in the booth at all, given the fact that the machine and I pretty much had this thing licked. I concluded of course that she must be there to collect the money, so I proceeded to pay her. Not a good assumption as she pointed me back to the machine to insert my payment. OK, I get it, I interact with the machine for this too…no problem, thinking that this is a pretty good solution. I wait for the machine to give me my receipt, an obvious assumption given how the first two steps went. Nope…wrong again. This time she wants me to drive to her and pick up my receipt, at which point she presses a button, lifts the gate, and I’m on my merry way.

I can’t help thinking about all the time and money went into implementing this slick new solution, that probably cost an arm and a leg, had little to no impact on cost savings, destroyed customer satisfaction, and obviously put the employee in a perpetual stae of ‘grumpy’. No…what this was, is yet another example of “technology for technology’s sake”.

When I work with organizations on business impovement, one of the most important themes I try to drill home is PROCESS FIRST, then technology. You don’t implement technology on top of a broken process. Nor do you attempt to fix a broken brocess with technology only.

The right path is to measure the effectiveness of the process before you begin. Establish a baseline. Understand how the process works today (‘As Is’ State). Look for places to improve the process. Define changes. Examine the effect of each potential change on overall performance. Then, and only then, define the technology, systems, skills, and organization needed to support the new process. Develop cost benefits and business cases. Re-examine the degree to which performance will be improved over baseline. And then your almost ready for implementation.

It’s a simple principle, but one that often get overlooked. Try to pay some attention to this in your everyday life and you’ll probably see many similar examples. Then, use these as lessons learned, and start living by the mantra- “First Things First”- process first, technology later.

-b

D-M-A-I-C Revisited…

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Bob Champagne

As a follow up to my post yesterday, and my recent attempts to expand our thinking on what Enterprise Performance Management really is, I’ll focus a little bit on another integral part of the collective whole- the “analytic and problem solving” side of the equation.

My thinking on this was triggered largely by a twitter post I received yesterday which read “Why is Performance Management focused on measurement & control – it should release performance rather than trying to contain it”. I believe the tweet was actually zeroing in on the “contain and control” element of some of today’s more popular business improvement frameworks, viewing their thinking as somehow contradictory to actually building value …kind of suggesting an “either/ or” mindset. But the more I reflected on it, I realized that, for me, this was more of an “and/both” issue. Let me explain…

There are many problem solving frameworks out there when it c

omes to business improvement, but one of the most common approaches is built upon the Lean and Six Sigma disciplines- a collection of problem solving and analysis tools and practices which have emerged in many organizations across the globe in the past decade as the business improvement philosophy of choice.

One of the many tools applied by the Lean community when approaching a business problem is what they call D-M-A-I-C (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control). You can also find this principle within many other business improvement frameworks, but its roots reside in some of the very early thinking in the development of the Lean, Six Sigma and related improvement/ quali

ty methodologies. I’ve kind of always viewed DMAIC as an extension of the old Plan-Do-Check-Adjust model, but I’m sure some of the Lean purists would probably take issue with that, and I certainly can’t debate that. What I can tell you is that these kind of tools and mental models do work, and help greatly in demystifying and putting a problem into a bigger and more relevant context.

But in my view, it does fail to capture two critical dimensions:

The importance of alignment- I’ve discussed this at length in some of my previous posts (securing alignment), but suffice it to say, it is one of the main reasons that strategies fail, and that KPI’s that are viewed as critical by management, often get ignored. Simply defining the business objective or problem statement and jumping straight to the measurement aspect seems to miss the importance of the alignment that is required before the problem can be attacked head on with maximum commitment from the team.
The importance of Value Capture (or what I often refer to as value RELEASE)- There is some good thinking that is emerging in this area, and I encourage you to explore it. But the key implication us that if we don’t put a high degree of emphasis on capturing the value (“ringing the cash register” in some way), then all we have really engaged in is a philosophical or analytic exercise. Whenever I see pockets of an organization deploying Lean based tools, without significant involvement from the CFO and budgeting functions (which is the primary control mechanism to capture, contain, and ensure value is released), I get concerned. See my EOY review of EPM trends (bullet #3) for a discussion of this)

I am certainly not proposing another itteration of DMAIC or PDCA, as these models have served us well over the years. And since philosophies like Lean, Six Sigma,and the older ones like TQM are the closest we’ve gotten to the kind of holistic approaches to EPM I recommend in yesterday’s post, we cant be too quick to dismiss some of their core tenets.

But I do submit that these two missing components – alignment and value capture– are too critical to be left out of the discussion, and simply embedded into the broader methodology. Like I suggested yesterday, our thinking often gets limited because of the nature of the disciplines and practitioners involved, and in this case we may be seeing the same thing. Lean thinking is highly analytical and problem solving oriented, and hence, some of its practitioners tend to place less emphasis on other complementary disciplines needed here: the human side of aligning leadership teams and employees, and the financial realism of actually releasing value on the back end of the cycle. And when that occurs, we can be left with the coolest mathematical equations, graphs and control charts, with little hope that value will actually accrue on the back end.

I’d like to hear your thoughts.

-b

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