For this exercise you need to be really clear on your priorities and objectives. You can get help for this on the ‘Clarifying objectives’ briefing and the ‘Setting SMART objectives’ exercise.
Deciding on the specific performance measures you want to look at is then a matter of looking at each objective and coming up with an indicator that meets the criteria below.
Your performance measures should be:
- Easy and cheap to collect
- Accurate and easy-to-understand
- Quantifiable - to judge progress
- Focused on outcomes, processes and inputs
Ideally, you will have outcome measures that tell you very directly whether you are meeting your target. Sometimes that is too difficult, though. In these cases you will need to make do with measuring how well you are doing on the activities that you hope will lead eventually to you hitting your target.
For example, your target might be to pass an exam in July. You want to get 70% in the exam. You don’t just want to wait until July for your only measure of progress, though, so you set up targets on the way. You might have practice exams in May and June, and your measures might be to score 60% in the May exam and 65% in June. Or you might say, “I want to put in 4 hours work each week from February to July”. This measure meets the criteria of easy to collect, easy to understand and measure accurately, and being quantifiable. It is not your final outcome measure – that’s the 70% in July – but it’s a process measure along the way. You have chosen it because you have good reason to believe that if you put in 4 hours a week from February you will get the final result you are aiming for.