A tongue in Cheek look at creating a performance management systems: Outcome Measures

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.