#87 How to Bid a Performance Measure Farewell?

There are a few reasons why you may have performance measures you just don't need anymore:

• your strategy or goals have changed, and old measures are no longer relevant to what you're trying to achieve
• you've spent some time designing more meaningful measures, better than the old ones
• you've sharpened your focus and only need a subset of the measures you currently have

In any case, you may feel uncertain about what to do with the measures you no longer need. The idea of just throwing them out entirely might feel liberating, or it might feel a bit rash. But throwing them away is just one option.

Option 1: Throw them away.

Stop collecting the data you no longer need. Stop capturing the data, and stop reporting the measures that are based on that data. Totally eliminate the measures and all the effort behind them from you business or organisation. We do have a tendency to hold onto things we don't need, and they waste time and effort that is much better spent elsewhere.

For example, many contact centres are moving away from measures of average call handling time (AHT) in preference to first-call resolution (FCR), because the former drives behaviour to rush each customer, while the latter is much more customer focused. Why measure something at all if it drives the wrong behaviours?

Option 2: Give them to someone else.

Delegate the measures you no longer want to focus on, to someone who is better positioned to focus on those measures and take responsibility for tracking, interpreting and responding to them. Of course, they still need to be measures that are relevant to the goals of the business!

We also have a tendency to hold onto things that are better done by others. It will free up your time to give to more important performance results by letting go. Just like a CEO that delegates the measurement of operational results to her operational team so she can stay focused on the strategic measures, what measures should you be delegating?

Option 3: Put them on the backburner.

If you have clear definitions for your performance measures, where their calculation and source data are documented, you can safely stop actively reporting a measure knowing that if you ever need it again in the future, you just need to turn it back on again.

It's all still there in the background - just not distracting you as you focus on more important measures. The data is still there, the process for producing the measure is still there, you just have to compute some historic values and then start reporting again should you ever need to.

Finally, mark the occasion.

When you have decided which measures you're saying farewell to, and you've sent them off to someone else, to the backburner or to oblivion, mark the occasion by removing them from your business plans and reports too. Announce the change, and then get everyone refocused on the measures that now matter most.