ER + PI + Target = Performance Story

How many people would be willing to take a final exam after reading only one chapter of the course textbook? Hopefully no one. So why do so many people only focus on one chapter of their performance story?

My experience has always been that most program managers feel their job is done once they've defined what their Expected Results (ER) are. Occassionaly, I come across a program manager that also takes an interest in which Performance Indicators (PI) are used to measure progress against those results. But it's very rare that I find someone who finishes their performance story by also identifying appropriate targets.

Here's an example of how the three chapters fit together into a story.

Say you're a program manager responsible for delivering a program that treats drinking water on reserves. Your performance story might look something like this:

Expected Result: Clean and safe drinking water for the residents of the Little Buffalo Reserve.
Performance Indicator: Number of boil water advisories.

If you end your performance story there, you get misleading data. While there's no doubt that boil water advisories are directly related to clean and safe drinking water, you have to ask what your target is.

The way it reads right now, someone might be lead to think that the more boil water advisories, the better job you're doing. But would you want to define your success by the number of times you communicate your failure in providing safe drinking water? Probably not. It's better to have no boil water advisories at all because you've put enough checks and balances in place to ensure safe and clean drinking water 100% of the time.

So, your performance story would be better if it read:

Expected Result: Clean and safe drinking water for the residents of the Little Buffalo Reserve.
Performance Indicator: Number of boil water advisories.
Target: Zero boil water advisories for 2010.

That's a performance story that makes sense.

Read more about developing Key Performance Indicators.