Book Review: Relevance - Hitting Your Goals by Knowing What Matters

The more I dig around looking for good measures for people who ask me things like “how do I measure IT effectiveness?” and “how do you measure competence?” and “what’s a good measure for innovation?”, the more frustrated I get.

Why? Because the internet, books, articles, papers and published business plans are filled with flimsy performance measures that are so obviously the product of half-hearted brainstorming sessions or quests to see what data is easily available to throw some metrics together.

Aaaargh! There are measures all over the place, which either don’t seem to be convincing evidence of the goals they flank, or are completely sans goals so you don’t even know why they matter or what they’re really telling you about.

Unless we can be clear about the results we want to achieve—the difference we want to make—measuring quickly amounts to wasted time and effort. No wonder so many people are cynical about measuring!

David Apgar apparently understands this problem. He is not a believer in filling up a Balanced Scorecard with measures, because the driver is almost always about getting a balanced set of measures. He believes that the driver for choosing measures should be testing strategic assumptions.

What a refreshing way to think about how to measure what matters: only measure to test your assumptions!

It means that you have to have clear strategies that are your best guesses about what will achieve your end goals or outcomes. And you measure to test if these best-guess strategies work, or not.

It takes measurement back to its roots: testing hypotheses to learn what impacts a result, and what doesn’t. That’s scientific thinking.
My only criticism of the book is that it lacks enough examples of the valuable points it makes, and it isn’t as smooth a read as I would have liked.

If you too are in desperate search of a way to find the absolute fewest measures that truly do matter, then David Apgar’s book, Relevance, is a must-have for your performance measurement reference library!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stacey Barr is the Performance Measure Specialist, helping strategic planners, business analysts and performance measurement officers confidently facilitate their organisation to create and use meaningful performance measures with lots of buy-in. Sign up for Stacey’s free email tips at www.staceybarr.com/202tipsKPI.html and receive a complimentary copy of her renowned e-book “202 Tips for Performance Measurement”.