Last week I took a class titled "Public Speaking Mastery," a two-day course designed to help people polish their public speaking skills. It was a great course for a consultant who has to speak in front of groups of people all the time and is always looking to hone his skills.

However, the performance measurement part of my brain asked, "How will I know if I actually learn anything from this course? How will I know if I improve over these days?" I wanted to know what the measure was for improved public speaking ability.

Now that the lockout is officially over, the amount of conversations revolving around football has picked up significantly. Football is something that I enjoy very much and like talking about whenever I get the chance. As a consultant, I also enjoy conversations centered on strategic management and the excitement that comes with each client. Over the weekend, I was talking to a friend about my job and, as most conversations between two, twenty-four year old males do, the topic eventually turned to football. In some odd way, this got me thinking about the similarities between football and strategic management. I know, a weird comparison, but stick with me and I think you will see where these thoughts came from.

Laura Downing, one of our founding partners, knows that I have a serious thing against averages. Every time someone says "the average went up", or the "average went down" she looks over to see my face contort in horror. So what's the big deal with averages?

We were recently working with a client on their Balanced Scorecard report and noticed something very interesting. While they had 6 years of data recorded, they only wanted to show the last two. Being a little bit of a performance geek, I had to ask why they were hiding those other 4 years, especially as the trend represented by the previous two years did not match the longer trend.

"It's great to be among my fellow Performance Management Geeks." An apropos opening by Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) at the 2011 Performance Symposium presented by the Department of Defense with the Performance Improvement Council. Senator Warner was one of many influential speakers who delivered high impact presentations to an audience of Lean Six Sigma Black Belts, Performance Improvement Officers and every other flavor of performance management professional that you will find across the federal government. As a proud member of the Performance Management Geeks club I wanted to capture some of the key messages and takeaways from the symposium and share them here.

In the previous post, Mark Cutler highlighted a recent Wall Street Journal article entitled "School Reform, Chicago Style." Near the end of the post, he mentions that one issue for Chicago Public Schools may be the fact that they are measuring too many things. This got me thinking about how important it is to spend time determining the appropriate measures for your organization, and making sure they are tied directly back to the strategy. Having too many measures can be a drain on an organization's time and resources, without providing much added benefit. With budgets being cut and more supporters demanding proof of impact, measuring the wrong things can be costly in more ways than one.

An article in Saturday, June 25's Wall Street Journal, "School Reform, Chicago Style," provided an interesting picture on measuring performance.

The schools were gathering a lot of data. "Two number crunchers at Marshall [High School] digested tens of thousands of data points, from the frequency of fights to cheerleaders' GPAs." After a year's worth of data collection and analysis, some schools in Chicago were seeing "promising trends."

As most people who have children know, a major milestone in a newborn's first few months of life is when he finally sleeps through the night. If it isn't obvious why this is a milestone, I will tell you: Because his parents get to sleep through the night as well.

Well, with an eight-week old baby boy who was waking up about three times per night and a pediatrician for a wife, something had to give. So, I wasn't surprised when she handed (figuratively, since she gave me the Nook book) me The Baby Sleep Solution. "Read this," she said, "This is how we are going to get him to sleep through the night."

It is often said that government agencies either do not have the discipline or are too easily distracted by operational issues to concentrate on measuring how well they execute their strategy. Agency heads pay lip service to strategy execution and never attend strategy review meetings, so "why should we care?" managers ask.

Well, I listened to a webinar the other day at which Peter Grace, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD's) Director of the Office of Strategic Planning and Management, discussed HUDStat, the Department's performance measurement and accountability process. HUDstat helps HUD comply with the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) Modernization Act requirement that each agency conduct senior-led progress reviews on their priority goals.

A few weeks ago, we hosted "Managing for Performance," which focused on how performance management can help districts optimize the performance of their central office, school zones, and classrooms. Hosted in partnership with the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation and the District of Columbia Public Schools, the event convened districts from around the country on the critical topic of performance management.