Tuesday 9 October 2012

I thought that today I would talk about performance targets. The government came into power in 2010 on a wave of anti-target rhetoric but we seem now to have more than ever. See the link below to see a 400% increase in targets over the last couple of years.


http://whitehallwatch.org/2012/08/20/targets-what-targets-change-and-continuity-in-the-performance-regime-in-whitehall/

My main beef with targets is that they don’t work and they cause massive amounts of waste – waste that we pay for in terms of poorer performance and increased costs.

The main causes of waste are many, but the main culprits are always: treating all customer demand as value work; variation and its misunderstanding; targets; poorly designed work (flow); IT; thinking (command and control); Inspection regimes and specification; management (and their decisions) disconnected from the work; and leadership (or a lack thereof).

Targets cause waste for several reasons. Firstly, there is no reliable way of setting a target. They are always guesses usually made by people who don’t understand the current system. Targets come from manufacturing, my background where standardisation is absolutely vital. They work there. In the public sector of course, every client, community and customer is different so our systems have to absorb variety. Targets can never work in such a system where the client is involved in production. It is also interesting to note that people quite rationally cheat to meet the target. Think investment bankers and performance related pay...

Measures derived from a deep knowledge and understanding of our systems are important. To select good measures, always start with customer purpose. The purpose of measurement is to understand and improve the system. It’s that simple! If a measure doesn’t enable you to do this it is not the right one. Measurement is not about managing people, managing activity or managing volumetrics. These are all important for managers to do but not by setting targets.

I use four simple rules for establishing measures:

1. Does it help to understand the work?

2. Does it show variation in the process?

3. Does it relate to customer purpose?

4. Does it relate to customer experience? (I often ask customers to rate the service they’ve just had on 1-10 scale and to suggest one improvement. Try it, it’s incredible what you learn... A 7 or below is a problem.)

Any useful measure needs to do at least one of these.

For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Thanks for reading and see you at next weeks’ staff forums in Salisbury. Talk again in a week or so.

Carlton