I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. Confucius (680-740) I am often asked by customers about what industry metrics should be used for their dashboards and scorecards. The thought being that implementing best in class metrics will make them a best in class organiza... [More]

On Tuesday March 2nd I will be in the Microsoft booth talking about Business Intelligence at The Art of Marketing conference. What does Business Intelligence have to do with Marketing? All kinds of things. With Business Intelligence you can: Use statistical techniques to segment your customers ... [More]

Have you ever been in the situation where you needed to know something about a population and don’t have the budget to measure it for everyone? By sampling a population and applying an Excel function you can obtain an approximation for the overall population. This concept is best illustrated through... [More]

An important part of getting value out of a Business Intelligence system is interpreting results correctly. We can often be fooled into attributing cause to random results. Consider the following graph of sales over time. It looks like something caused Sales to drop for three months. Management ... [More]

  “One should not appraise human action on the basis of its results.” -  Jakob Bernoulli (1654-1705) This statement has significant implications on devising metrics for Performance Management. In fact, at first glance it could be interpreted as why should we m... [More]

The last objective I will look at as part of the series supporting Metrics for Successful Project Delivery is “Deliver Projects on Time”. Along with budget it is the most watched metric for projects. The key point to recognize is different people in an organization have different ways to contributin... [More]

Last week I discussed the objective “Maintain high project data quality”. I’m going to keep on the quality theme but switch to the objective “Provide high quality deliverables”. Deliverables mean different things depending on what business you are in. For the purposes of this discussion I will assum... [More]

In my previous post, Metrics for Successful Project Delivery, I mentioned that I am kicking off a series of posts that provide objectives and supporting metrics for  managing the delivery of projects. The objective “maintain high project data quality” is a key objective to implement first. With... [More]