How A Small Organization Can Develop It's Own Scorecard

A scorecard is a tool that helps businesses, organizations, and governments monitor progress and track measurable outputs against their set goals, and objectives. It is a snapshot of where an organization stands at a given point in time against the overall goals.

3 Best Practices For Dealing With Disruptive Employees

Rabble rouser. Pot stirrer. Fly in the ointment. These are some terms used to describe the person in the organization that brings some benefit to the team but by far their disruption to the team far outweighs the benefit they offer. This is the person that can be passive-aggressive in meetings, send along flaming emails in the barely veiled disguise of humor, and looks to be the demonstrative non-participant in management team functions. How do you deal with this negative influence?

I Gotta Be Me - So Do All Leaders

Have you ever been forced into a mold you didn't really fit? How did it make you feel? How much did it carry over to your personal life? How did it impact your self respect and confidence? How fast did you want to get out of that situation?

My Way Or The Highway?

As the economy and labor market improves, will some of your key people choose the highway?

5 Tips for Improving Margins and the Bottom Line

There's a limit to the extent to which we can cut costs before we hurt our company's long term growth potential. To get steady, incremental increases in profit we have to sell more and improve margins.

How Busy Is Too Busy

Just as the car crested a hill it stopped. The engine went silent and the car just coasted. Thinking quickly, Simon managed to steer onto the shoulder of the road before he came to a complete halt. It was only then that he noticed the needle of the fuel gauge resting comfortably at its lowest position.

The Ingredients of Accountability

Are you throwing around the word 'accountability' and no-one is catching it? This article takes a look at what practical steps you can take to improve the chances that people will be accountable for the goals they are responsible for.

6 Performance Measure Facilitator Attributes

Just like a business or organisation has a management accountant and a strategic planner, it also needs a performance measurement facilitator, someone to be the expert that helps everyone in the organisation measure what really matters in achieving the organisation's direction. It's a new career emerging in today's information and knowledge economy. And here are the 6 attributes they need to have.

5 Tips for Naming Measures

The magic of language applies very well to the way we craft our performance measures. The topic of this article is 5 tips for naming your measures so they get more recognition, ownership and trust.

Better Practice Inventory Management

People are always searching for 'best practice', somehow believing that there is a silver bullet solution that will cure their inventory problems. The problem, of course, is that what is best practice in one country/industry/business might not be best practice in another. In any case, the exalted 'best' practice might just be too much of a jump for many people to take or indeed may not be economically viable.

Inventory Reduction Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between inventory management and inventory reduction? How does the different focus of inventory management and inventory reduction impact the outcome? These and other key questions are answered in a straight forward no BS manner.

The Importance and Awesome Power of Project Management in Today's Business Environment

Why is project management important and what awesome power exists with project management in today's business environment? The first reasons that come to my mind about why project management is important (based upon more than 35 years of my personal project management experience), are tighter budgets, diminishing resources, more and more time constraints, and competition to improve the ways we do business. The awesome power of project management makes it possible to focus on priorities, track and measure performance, overcome challenges and problems, become flexible enough to adapt to change and achieve higher performance and a higher probability of success in each project.

How to Design Great Performance Measures

Recently I was doing some weird kind of performance measurement when I was mulching my garden, like how could I reduce the number of shovels needed to fill the wheelbarrow, or how many wheelbarrow loads could I move in 30 minutes? Easy stuff to measure, I suppose. But I know there are lots of things you've come across that aren't that easy to measure. This article has some tips for making the hard stuff more easily measurable.

Regaining World Market Share Starts With Getting Physical - And Agile

Taking dramatic steps to become agile is necessary to be a manufacturing contender in the next century. Organizations must focus on moving information and products quickly through the entire service chain- distribution, assembly, manufacture, and supply. All physical and logical events within the service chain must be enacted swiftly, accurately, and effectively. The faster parts, information, and decisions flow through an organization, the faster it can respond to customer needs.

Buy-in to Performance Measurement - How to Get People Involved in Measuring Performance

It's been said that unless people have ownership of their performance measures, there won't be any sustained improvement in performance. Buy-in is the holy grail of performance improvement - here's how to get more of it!