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41 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
5 stars +! Must have if you're in Performance Management as IT or Management Consultant, January 3, 2006
This review is from: Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business (Hardcover)
I'm PMP (Project Management Professional), active in Performance Management for the last 6 years. My IT knowledge is about the average, I'm very confident in design sophisticated Excel files to sort and analyze Performance data. This is a type of book I was looking for a while! Help me to understand the IT side of managing Performance Management data. It is not an IT book, this means even non IT educated readers, like myself, can highly benefit of it.
I strongly reccomend this book to a variety of professionals for different reasons:
* to not so experienced Managers and Project Managers: it gives a great overview of how is possible to integrate IT in business/projects in order to take fully advantage of using accurate data, benefit actionable information, be results oriented. Also it shows how is possible to succesfully manage design and implement a Performance Dashboard project, and use it to empower people, stay on target, understand the big picture. This is an excellent start to understand how to deal with IT projects, and how to smartly use IT in taking right time decisions.
* to experienced Managers and Project Managers: a superb view of how to communicate better with IT, speak same language and design results oriented applications. The author presents very well how is possible try to balance and to compromise (and hopefully succeed!) the IT need of planning, and clear specifications, and management desire to have the final product in place over the night. Strongly hope the managers will better understand this process and they will learn it is worth while spend some more time with planning and testing, instead of waisting 10 times more later, in desperate attempts to catch up with changes, running around the clock and making last time improvements.
* for IT professionals: it might be a back on earth lesson. In a lot of companies IT is a tool to reach business objectives and not the ultimate goal. The people wich are not so IT skilled might be good some other places, and is nice they are like this. If IT experts will spend some more time with them, they finally might understand how can use IT applications in their advantage.
I will keep it as a future refference when I'll be in the position to design performance measurement databases, customize reports, plan data analyzis, join teams with IT experts. Thank you Wayne, this really helped me!
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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quo vadis?, April 11, 2007
For purposes of discussion, pretend that your organization is a vehicle within which you and your associates travel en route to a series of destinations; for example, various stages of progressively improved operational efficiency and progressively increased profitability. One key question arises: How well is your vehicle performing?
The three "dashboards" (i.e. operational, tactical, and strategic) that Wayne Eckerson offers in this volume can help to answer that question. "The monitoring application conveys critical information at a glance using timely and relevant data, usually with graphical elements; the analysis application lets users analyze and explore performance data across multiple dimensions and at different levels of detail to get at the root cause of problems and issues; the management application fosters communication among executives, managers, and staff and gives executives continuous feedback across a range of critical activities, enabling them to `steer' their organizations in the right direction."
The ultimate success of the cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective system which Eckerson discusses in this book depends on several factors: sufficient leadership and resources at all levels of implementation, correct and consistent application of the right metrics, a compelling graphical user interface, and contingency planning which ensures user adoption while driving the organizational changes.
I especially appreciate Eckerson's provision of three mini case studies that illustrate how -- in real-world situations - the three performance "dashboards" can achieve the desired objectives. Specifically, those that are operational (Quicken Loans, Inc., pages 127-141), those which are tactical (International Truck and Engine Corp., pages 143-158), and those which are strategic (Hewlett Packard Co., pages 159-177). I also appreciate the material provided in Part Three (Critical Success Factors: Tips from the Trenches) as Eckerson correlates various multilayered applications built on business intelligence and data integration infrastructure that enables any organization (regardless of size or nature) to measure, monitor, and manage business performance more effectively.
All executives recognize the importance of accurate and consistent measurement of what really matters. Obviously, the "what" varies (sometimes significantly) from one organization to another. In my opinion, the three performance "dashboards" that Eckerson recommends can be of substantial benefit, whatever the given "what" may be but if - and only if - the aforementioned success factors are present. To repeat, they are: sufficient leadership and resources at all levels of implementation, correct and consistent application of the right metrics, a compelling graphical user interface, and contingency planning which ensures user adoption while driving the organizational changes.
This book is by no means an "easy read" but it will generously reward those who absorb and digest its material with appropriate care. Then what? He fully understands how difficult it is to ensure adoption by others, and, to manage performance effectively throughout the given enterprise. In the final chapter, Eckerson notes that performance dashboards can easily backfire and cause performance to decline or stall instead of climb. He then identifies what he characterizes as eight cardinal sins " that can turn a performance dashboard into a performance quagmire." How to avoid them? Eckerson offers nine strategies to ensure adoption and eight strategies to manage performance.
I highly recommend this brilliant book as well as Dean Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement. Both are eminently worthy of thoughtful and rigorous consideration. However, that said, I also offer a caveat expressed by Peter Drucker in 1963: "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all." Invoking again the "vehicle" metaphor introduced in the first paragraph of this brief commentary, I presume to suggest that if you and your companions don't know where you are going, "any road will get you there."
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How to use information to energize your goals and strategy., June 16, 2008
This review is from: Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business (Hardcover)
Modern corporations collect vast amounts of data. Unfortunately, they too often mistake having massive amounts of data for having useful and actionable information. They are not the same thing. Even when a company knows how to transform data into usable information, there are still steps left to take that that information and make it accessible and usable throughout the organization in a manageable and coordinated way.
Wayne Eckerson explains how to use performance dashboards to display information on screens that help people do their job, understand where they are against the company's strategic objectives and goals, and give them the ability to drill down into the data as required by their job. These screens should be designed to be simple to read and understand (he says they should be designed with for a 12 year old), but empowering for their users.
There are three broad types of performance dashboards: Operational, Tactical, and Strategic. These must be handled differently, and I think the author does a great job in explaining how you should implement these. Each type gets a case study of a company that shows the reasons and methods for the implementation.
This book is for more for technical types, but it should also be looked at by the business types involved with driving and supporting such an initiative. I also appreciated Eckerson's emphasis on the a thaw between the usual tensions between the IT and Business teams.
A helpful and useful book.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
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