How to Measure Performance Management And How to Improve

Does your organization have a dynamic way to see (and share) how your strategy fits together? Do you have a way to assess which initiatives are going well and which are struggling? These are foundational elements of business performance management, and go hand-in-hand with strategy management. In this article, we’ll explain why seeing your full strategy in one place is important and why software is the best tool your organization can use to do it well.

Defining Business Performance Management

Performance management is a term commonly heard in the hallways of companies across all industries. While it can be applied to everything from HR initiatives to software development, in this article we’re specifically referring to business performance management, and explain it as the art of defining, measuring, and ultimately achieving your strategy.

Business performance management (also called corporate performance management, enterprise performance management, or corporate reporting) analyzes how an entire organization is doing. Think of it as a company-wide health check at the strategic level (versus operational or tactical levels). To get an accurate read on performance, corporate, division, and department goals must be aligned, which is no small feat. Each organization should choose a framework to approach the process, such as the Balanced Scorecard (our favorite) or OKRs.

The best time to get started with business performance management is ideally after you create your strategic plan and are ready to launch the implementation phase.

The Importance Of Business Performance Management

This effort is important because it’s the best way for your business to achieve more of its goals—even companies with the strongest offerings and happiest customers need to do this. And while both business performance measurement and performance management (yes, there is a difference) take significant time and resources, it pays off when your organization is able to consistently perform at maximum levels.

Business performance management will help you:

• Understand and eliminate gaps between how your organization should perform versus how it is performing
• Set realistic expectations for your organization’s overarching strategy, departments, and employees
• Foster better communication and cooperation between departments
• Become more organized and efficient, focusing only on the efforts that drive the business forward
• Develop a methodical, repeatable process to improve business performance

Reliably Measure & Improve Business Performance Management With Software

It’s far too common for strategies to gather dust on the shelf after the planning phase wraps up, so organizations must push to keep the momentum going and implement a business performance management program immediately. It’s not mandatory to use technology to help you with this process, but it makes everything significantly easier and faster—your organization will be able to focus on making decisions instead of on administrative busywork.

Here are the top ways strategy software can help you measure and improve your business performance management:

Goals

• Align your goals across departments and perspectives to see exactly how each goal relates to the overall strategy.
• Link measures and initiatives to each goal to see how these elements inform each other.
• Use qualitative information to track the progress of your business goals in an accessible format that can be easily shared.

Performance Data

• Automatically upload and sync data to eliminate manual data entry.
• Manipulate and view your data in unlimited ways to provide the appropriate insights to each audience.
• Automatically calculate business performance metrics to avoid manual number crunching or complex spreadsheet formulas.
• Set criteria that automatically evaluates the status of any measure and displays it as an easy-to-understand red, amber, or green indicator.
• Create visualizations like custom charts to reveal trends over time and present your data in an appealing, easily digestible format.

Performance Evaluations

• Instantly identify which elements of your strategic plan are above, on, or below target through automated evaluations.
• View clear performance measurements that aid conversations about what actions your organization should take to change or update strategies.
• Generate summary reports and briefing books to pull lots of information into one place, helping you view, interpret, and share results easily.
• Use standardized formats and templates to save hours of time and energy that were previously spent on workarounds.

Strategy Management

• Get a streamlined platform to visualize, quantify, and track your strategic goals so you can accurately improve your performance.
• Track your strategy and discover new ways to improve it with customizable and flexible tools that allow you to make changes on the fly.
• Access all strategic information and its progress in one central hub, which can easily be pulled for any meetings (such as monthly or quarterly reviews) where results are discussed and future actions decided.

ClearPoint has helped hundreds of organizations reach their strategic goals. Our software is built to manage your strategy, which includes tracking and measuring business performance. Flexible and customizable, you’ll have the powerful tools you need to keep everyone and everything moving forward with purpose.