Designing Performance Measurement Systems: Theo... ^NEW^
Selecting the right performance indicators is hardly a simple undertaking. This book describes in detail the main characteristics of performance measurement systems and summarizes practical methods for defining KPIs, combining theoretical and practical aspects. These descriptions are supported by a wealth of practical examples. The book is intended for all academics, professionals and consultants involved in the analysis and management of KPIs.
Designing Performance Measurement Systems: Theo...
Matthew Forti is the Performance Measurement Capability Area manager at the Bridgespan Group, an advisory firm to mission-driven leaders and organizations. Matt has supported several leading organizations in the design and implementation of performance measurement systems that promote continuous learning and improvement, the primary focus of his blog, Measuring to Improve. Matt is also the founding board chair of One Acre Fund, a nonprofit that assists over 50,000 smallholder farming families in East Africa to triple their crop yields.
Performance measurement and improvement are systematic processes by which an organization continuously and consistently tracks and applies important program and operations data for the purpose of optimizing its ability to efficiently and effectively advance its desired social impact. The most powerful performance measurement systems are typically a core responsibility of an organization's own staff, who integrate program, financial and organizational data to measure an organization's progress and success.
Building Capacity to Measure and Manage PerformanceNonprofits that want to have a great impact on the world also need the capacity to use measurement to improve their performance. Interviews with a wide range of nonprofit leaders and our own work with Bridgespan clients suggest five key elements to measurement success.
Measurement as Learning: What Nonprofit CEOs, Board Members, and Philanthropists Need to Know to Keep ImprovingMeasurement has become an increasingly hot topic as more funders want to know how their money is being used and as nonprofits undertake evaluations to prove that their programs work. But one of the most important uses of measurement is to improve performance.
Building a Performance Measurement System: A How-To GuideThis practical guide developed by Root Cause provides detailed guidance on developing a customized performance-measurement system, including developing internal dashboards and external report cards, analyzing performance data, creating a culture of learning and continuous improvement, and using data-based evidence to build funder confidence.
Working Hard and Working Well: A Practical Guide to Performance MeasurementIn this book, Dr. David Hunter provides history, context, guidance, exercises, and tools for those who wish to move their organizations toward performance measurement.
Ten Thousand StrongThis case study from Business Strategy Review shares five key lessons from the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women initiative to create an effective performance-measurement approach and shows why signature philanthropic initiatives should build measurement into their programs from day one.
The specialty of Industrial Organizational Psychology addresses issues of recruitment, selection and placement, training and development, performance measurement, workplace motivation and reward systems, quality of work life, structure of work and human factors, organizational development and consumer behavior.
Jonathan Glover is the James L. Dohr Professor of Accounting and Chair of the Accounting Division at Columbia Business School. His research interests include financial and managerial accounting, public policy, accounting history, information economics, mechanism design, incentive theory, and relational contracts. The topics he has worked on include earnings management, accounting conservatism, financial accounting standard setting and regulation, corporate governance, information system design, performance measurement, and managerial compensation. He has published more than 50 research papers in leading journals in accounting, economics, and related fields.
Research on the validity and reliability of specific questions on police performance is lacking in Canada and the Western World. Three notable studies have attempted to conceptualize and test specific measures of police performance measured through public opinion polling in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. In Canada, only one national survey administered by Statistics Canada every five years asks six questions on police performance. This constitutes the only source of public opinion police performance metrics that is comparable across time and place in Canada. Questions asked on surveys of municipal police tend to be unstandardized and inconsistent, with varying response category thus making them incomparable across time and place. More research into either testing the existing questions or creating new standardized questions is required to improve the measurement of public satisfaction with the services provided by the police in Canada.
Police undertake a broad array of work. Other than the traditionally-assigned tasks of pursuing, arresting and charging criminals, preventing crime from occurring, and dealing with traffic-related offences and accidents, police are further expected to resolve various conflicts in their communities, reduce or prevent social disorder, and construct and maintain community relations. It is important to understand that the measurement of police performance is a complicated task that has multiple dimensions (Coleman, 2012; Maguire, 2003; Moore and Braga, 2003). There is no single measure that will be even remotely close to measuring the performance of everything the police does.
More research into either testing the existing questions or creating new standardized questions is required to improve the measurement of public satisfaction with the services provided by the police in Canada. A project similar to the creation of European indicators of trust in justice (Jackson et al, 2011) that involves discussion among experts, proper testing and re-testing of measures of police performance needs to take place. In the absence of valid, reliable, and standardized indicators, police services and policy makers will continue to ask different, sometimes vague questions that are not comparable. Such inconsistent measurement of police performance runs the risk of poorly evaluating the performance or police and policing policies and practices across Canada, leading to inefficient and ineffective policing and ultimately compromising the public safety of Canadians.
According to Neely et al (1995), performance measurement may be defined as the process of quantifying the efficiency or effectiveness of an action, while a performance measure is the metric used in the quantification process.
Police undertake a broad array of work. Other than the traditionally-assigned tasks of pursuing, arresting and charging criminals, preventing crime from occurring, and dealing with traffic-related offences and accidents, police are further expected to resolve various conflicts in their communities, reduce or prevent social disorder, and construct and maintain community relations. Having recognized the broad spectrum of tasks assigned to the police, it is important to understand that the measurement of police performance is a complicated task that has multiple dimensions (Coleman, 2012; Leckie, 2012; Kiedrowski et al, 2013; Maguire, 2003; Moore and Braga, 2003). There is no single measure that will be even remotely close to measuring the performance of everything the police do. The process of measuring the success of the police work is far from straightforward.
Using arrest and infraction data as a primary performance measurement for police work can be problematic for several reasons. First, the definition of arrest can vary among different agencies. Various studies in the U.S., for example, show that uniformity in how police agencies define arrest is lacking, therefore making comparisons between agencies close to impossible (Sherman, 1980a; Sherman, 1980b). Second, an arrest is but one of the options for action for police officers in a difficult situation. In this sense, an arrest could be seen as a failure by a police officer to employ other strategies to resolve the situation in another manner. For example, petty crimes such a theft of small, inexpensive items in a supermarket or possession of a small amount of marijuana could result in issuance of a warning rather than an arrest. For youthful offenders, in certain cases, informal restitution arrangements or transfer to parental responsibility might also be an outcome of police involvement.
Clearance rates, which are the proportion of crimes solved by a police jurisdiction in a given period of time, are yet another traditional measure of police performance that has been used widely. In an ideal type of scenario, this indicator portrays the efficiency of police to counter crime in their assigned areas. The trouble with using the clearance rate as a measurement of performance is that it is prone to definition and measurement errors, making cross-comparisons difficult (Maguire, 2003; Riedel and Jarvis, 1999). For example, smaller communities may have a lower crime rate, which means police officers have fewer opportunities to solve crimes. On an individual basis, these officers would not fare well in statistical comparisons with their counterparts serving higher crime communities since their clearance rates would naturally be lower. Further, this measurement is less meaningful if it cannot be replicated or put into the context of other police services. A cross-sectional comparison that would control for number of people, neighbourhoods, businesses, and crime rates might be useful to partially address this issue (Whitaker et al, 1982).
Another, more involved approach to developing and testing indicators of police performance measured through polling could be the one proposed by Gallagher et al. (2001) or the one undertaken by Jackson et al (2011). It might begin with focus groups that would ask citizens in a community what satisfaction, confidence, or trust in the police mean to them. Rich data from these focus groups could then be reviewed by a panel of experts from law enforcement agencies, academia, and/or government with a goal of constructing specific questions on police performance. It should be noted that this consultative practice exists among some police jurisdictions in Canada; some jurisdictions, in their attempts to set up or improve their existing performance measurement framework, consult their peers through ad hoc peer-to-peer committees within the policing community (Kiedrowski et al, 2013). 041b061a72