Monitoring and measuring what we do does not always make people feel good or seem productive – this day will show that it can be hugely rewarding and transform your work. If you want to achieve success – and have it recognised by others – then you need to get ahead in the loop.

Meaningful metrics: aims, outcomes, analytics and big data.

One day training course

(Click to email me about possible dates)

Who is this training for?

This training is for anyone who wish to gain a deeper understanding of how they perform in achieving their aims. Anyone who wish to improve personal effectiveness through strategic thinking and the application of relevant metrics to measure the performance of their work or themselves.

What is the aim of the training?

The purpose of this course is to take delegates through seven basic steps that will:

Put a structure around what you do
Consider what measures/metrics are meaningful
- For you
- For others
How to take the metrics and understand performance
How to carry on making improvements

What will you will learn?

To focus on meaningful and useful expression of your objectives
How to think about, create and use meaningful metrics
The link between ‘doing the right things’ and ‘achieving the right goals’
How to prove your success to others
Analysing, extracting the message from and presenting your success
How to plan and get the best performance by Understanding Performance
To avoid wasting time and effort on unimportant ‘noise’

You will leave the course ready to apply immediately a new perspective on what you do every day. You will be equipped to improve your performance straight away and have learned to explain and demonstrate to others what you are achieving, how it is being done and how it is getting better.

Practical details

Live (online or in-person) training runs from a 0900h registration starting at 0930h prompt, breaking for lunch at 1245h and finishing at 1630h. There are breaks in morning and afternoon according to the programme and courses involve breakout or discussion sessions to aid concentration and optimise learning.

The cost is £365 (exc VAT) per delegate. Discounts may be available for non-profits, SMEs and multiple delegates.

This training is also available as in-house sessions. Costs are negotiable (but always give a discount on the individual delegate rates) and can include tailoring course material to specific requirements.

Course content

Learning objective

To appreciate and apply the seven steps towards Understanding Performance. To set out aims, monitor achievements and activities and link these. Understand the importance of a plan and how performance, activity and cost metrics link to this. To be able to analyse performance and use that analysis to revise plans, metrics and aims. To apply the learning to continually improve performance and explain performance to others.

Overall outline
What is Understanding Performance? Who is in the room today? How does UP apply to you?

Vision: the first stage of creating meaningful metrics for Understanding Performance. What are you trying to achieve? How can this be measured?

Activity: How does your activity link to your aims? Does it move in the right direction? How can you measure your activity with meaningful and reliable metrics? What would a plan look like? How would you use it to achieve – then exceed – your aims?

Understanding: How can you ‘avoid the noise’? Are you chasing false problems and wasting time? Are you falsely praising people (yourself?) and offering the wrong incentives?

Feedback: How do you use your new Understanding to continually improve what you do? How do you present your success to others now that you Understand Performance?

Take-away points and tomorrow’s changes

Course detail

Morning sessions

What is Understanding Performance?

Who is in the room? Delegates will be able to share why they are there and what they hope to get out of the day. The relevance and applications of Understanding Performance at the individual, team and organisation level will be explored through the examples of delegates’ own working contexts.

How does UP apply to you? The four topics (Vision, Activity, Understanding and Feedback) and the seven steps of Understanding Performance will be presented as an overall approach and for each step, through an open trainer-led exchange, the relevance of each part to delegates will be explored.

Vision

Step 1: Define your aims?

Delegates will discover the importance of this step and explore the implications, including the fact that aims can look different and are explained differently even though they are the same; the need for absolute honesty with yourself – and the need to be transparent with others; the links between this critical stage and the other steps. Also there will be an exploration of how many aims should be within the Framework and how to take a step up to thinking strategically in order to define aims in the most useful way.

Step 2: Establish outcome measures

The distinction between outputs, outcomes and impacts will be explored. The subtleties of establishing measures and whether they are measurable and/or useful will be discussed with delegates’ inputs from their contexts. Alongside the feasible measurement approaches there will be learning around how to navigate qualitative and quantitative measures, objective and subjective measures and the importance of using existing data and systems that record necessary information rather than information just for the sake of measurement.

Activity

Step 3: Link activity to aims

Every activity that is undertaken needs to be understood with relation to aims. This session explores how you can understand the causal links between what you (and everyone else) does and how that relates to measurable success. You will learn about the careful thinking required to see how activity moves you towards your aims.

Afternoon sessions

Activity (continued)

Step 4: Establish activity measures

This section covers two equally important aspects – setting up measures that will tell you if you are doing your activities well or badly and the testing of the links you believed to exist between activity and achievement. You will also learn about the importance of doing the first aspect thoroughly so that the conclusions you reach from the second part will be more reliable.

Understanding

Step 5: Make a plan for success: no targets

The session will discuss why it is often technically, operationally, psychologically and possibly even spiritually valuable not to have targets. Delegates will explore the notion of ‘a plan’ to achieve aims through the right kind of activity, carried out to the level, which will see that plan come to fruition

Step 6: Avoid the noise

This element highlights one thing that occurs time and time again to derail the whole show of well understood concepts and beautiful data-rich metrics: Noise. Delegates will learn about the mistake of treating noise as if it is something meaningful and what to do instead.

Feedback

Step 7: Feed back

At a final step delegates revisit the point behind meaningful metrics for Understanding Performance: you want to achieve something, you want to also, in most cases, continue to improve and better achieve. Feedback from every piece of evidence to revisit each stage is critical to ongoing success.

Take away points and tomorrow’s changes

This final session will be an interactive session to create a list of take away points for delegates. Delegates will also be encouraged to note down “tomorrow’s changes” as to what they will do when they go back to work to start using the learning that they have gained during the training.