New England
performance measures. A tongue in cheek look at creating a Performance
Management System or How to love a Puffy Coat. OUTPUTS
The first thing we
have to do is start with our mission. States don’t usually have missions or
visions but they do have slogans, motto. We’ll use Maine to start our example. We
could use the state flag-Dirigo. That means I Lead. Not
sure that’s so helpful. How about the license plate slogan,
Vacationland, ok but a little narrow. A lot of people add a bumper
sticker that says not on vacation so you're going to meet resistance. Maine
the Way Life Should Be or Maine Open for business. I’m going to
choose Maine the Way Life Should Be. It’s vague so the next thing you will want
is a committee to help promote performance measures and choose and define
measures.
Let’s drop it down to
apply performance measures to you.
Here’s one: the number
of pairs of mittens or gloves you have at the end of the winter. It’s
an output, activities conducted to get to the result you want. O is best
How about #number of
different types of winter boots you have. That may have a bias because it might
be measuring wealth
How about the last day
you wear your puffy coat? If you want to get technical, it’s really
the number of days between, say, Nov 1 and April 1 that you wore it. The
reverse could be used, the first time you put on your bathing suit. I
have friends who wait for the perfect day and then it slips by.
We very often put our
measures into ratios so the number of mittens and gloves lost/compared to the
grand total mittens and gloves you have at the end of the winter. If you have 5
pairs of gloves or mittens and you lose 2 2/10 =That’s 20%
But we really want
to know about the results of our actions We want to measure the way life should
be.
So let’s measure the
number of winter activities you participated in: hiking,
snowshoeing. Do you think snow shoveling counts? Let the
committee be the judge.
We really need to
balance it. Always balance your measures so one doesn’t drive the
others. Add number of summer activities, # of days you hiked, swam, biked.
Does it count if you sat around the pool? Here comes the committee
again.
Ah Now we are getting
closer to Maine the way life should be.
OUTCOMES
Let’s look at an
outcome, the result you want…Maine the way life should be. Well you
can use the number of summer activities and number of winter activities to
create an outcome measure. They are proxies for Maine the Life should be. We
are assuming getting out of doors is important
You’ll probably want
to turn it into a percent of time spent on weekends or something like that or
we could use the number of days, 90 that we count as summer or winter.
All play and no work
is not going to create Maine the Way Life should be. Remember that slogan open
for business. It’s an outcome we want to measure, so let’s add in
the average of wage for a financial measure.
Finally, you might
want to find out how satisfied your family and friends are going out in the
winter or summer. That the long term outcome. We don’t
want people to feel they have to leave and become snow birds or have to go to
Disney world with their kids in the winter. Maybe they didn’t like the camping
trip in the summer but did like the trip to the beach in the summer. You need
to know
You might be pretty
discouraged after you collect this data on number of winter activites and
summer. You’ve got a great 1 to 1 ration if you had 1 activity for summer and
one for winter. But one out of 90 days isn’t very good. I’ll talk
about process measures next time that will help you. Thanks for
listening.
