Performance Management & Strategy Execution Blog: The Glue

Accelerating Your Baldrige Journey - Free Webinar

Is your organization pursuing – or thinking about pursuing – the Baldrige Quality program or similar performance excellence criteria? If so, ActiveStrategy can help you achieve better results, and do so more quickly. Attend a free, informational webinar this Wednesday to learn how.

In the webinar we'll cover:

• How we help organizations take next steps on their Baldrige journeys by identifying, tracking, and managing to improve specific OFIs (Opportunities for Improvement).
• How our software, ActiveStrategy Enterprise, supports what organizations must do to score well in all seven Baldrige categories.
• How our software and services have benefited award-winning organizations in their own journeys.
• We'll also have the CEO of Feather River Hospital (a 3-time California CAPE Winner) as a special guest, discussing why they recently selected ActiveStrategy Enterprise software as a tool to help them achieve even more on their already impressive journey.

Webinar Details

Title:   How ActiveStrategy Accelerates Your Baldrige Journey

Date:   Wednesday, October 28th

Time:   2:00 - 3:00 pm Eastern (11 am - 12:00 pm Pacific)

To register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/519090752

If you can't make it, but are interested in the topic, register anyway. We'll send you a recording link after the live webinar. Also, check out our webinar archive for more topics that may be of interest.

Hope to see you there!

Healthcare: Quality Improvement for the Long Haul

In a recent write up from HealthLeaders Media, Elyas Bakhtiari provided a great summary from a recent panel discussion in Chicago, The Hospital of the Future Now. The leaders on the panel suggested five strategies for improving healthcare outcomes, all of which stress performance management principles as ways to drive results in hospitals. The strategies included:

1. Make quality permanent. The panelists made the point that we need to create a culture around quality, even setting quality as the foundation. I'd ask you to think about what you do to help make quality a key theme within your organization? What tools do you use to help keep your quality meetings timely and focused? Establishing a “rhythm” and an expected, repeatable approach to reviewing measures and the status of initiatives helps keep the quality message at the forefront.
2. Seek the right outcomes. The panelists talked about getting to the core of the measures that make a difference. At ActiveStrategy, we often describe this as identifying the “lagging vs. leading” measures. Does your organization report on “everything” – only to find that little to no gains are made over time? Focusing on the right set of metrics is a big key; it takes some work and targeted facilitation, but the impact is well worth the effort.
3. Include a broad community. Here the panel was stressing the point of focusing not only on the outcomes of procedures, but also on the outcomes of the communities being served. Again, I think the question from a performance management standpoint is: do you have the right metrics? Do your measures capture the impact you have (or wish to make) on both short term and long term outcomes? Collaborative measures may also be appropriate for joint efforts in areas like childhood obesity prevention or rural health programming.
4. Use technology to support, not drive, improvement. The panelists urged the attendees to beware of making technology a solution in itself. As you well know, with any implementation of technology, it’s the “meaningful use” of that tool or system that will help drive and sustain change.
5. Get ready for integration. The panel suggested that while new models like medical homes and accountable care organizations show promise, healthcare leaders need to continue pursuing innovation and new solutions.

When a Balanced Scorecard performance management framework is cascaded and deployed, it supports these approaches perfectly. It helps an organization focus on quality in a broad, outcome-based, collaborative, and integrated way -- making the quality message and the quality culture “stick.”

Have you come up with strategies to make quality a key, enduring theme? Let me know in the comments!

Using Spreadsheets for Performance Management: Why They Work and Why They Don’t - Part 4: Driving Action

If you’ve been following my previous posts in this series…and also know me and/or ActiveStrategy, you may have been wondering: Why is he praising Excel? Wasn’t ActiveStrategy created to replace Excel and other manual tools for performance management?

Yes, that’s true. And it’s also true that Excel is a great tool for the specific reasons and applications I blogged about.

But if you’re really trying to drive results at an enterprise level – trying to achieve the strategic outcomes your organization needs (and who isn’t?) – Excel is simply the wrong tool for that job. When it comes to performance management, Excel has a tendency to lead you down a swirling rat hole of bad data and missed opportunities, or help you build a performance management framework that will collapse under its own weight. I know. I’ve been there.

Why do I say this? Because although Excel is good with data, it is terrible for tracking action, ensuring accountability, and supporting a community of users that are trying to march together toward better performance and results.

Let’s first look at how Excel falls down when it comes to driving action.

As I’ve discussed before, data is only one ingredient for successful performance management. Another critical ingredient is action. The actions people take to learn why performance isn’t hitting targets. The actions people need to take to get performance back on track. Even the mundane actions people take to collect and report data and explain performance in one place. All of these actions are critical to improving rather than reporting results. And it is here that Excel begins to fall down.

Excel is, by its nature, a single file of data. You can open it and run some macros that do things, but in general it isn’t going to actively move people along to complete actions. For example:

• Excel won’t email a person and/or the boss when he/she needs to explain why a measure didn’t hit its target.
• Excel won’t capture the complete history of a portfolio of initiatives/strategic projects as they relate to the performance of a measure.
• Excel doesn't make it easy to capture action items during performance reviews or offer reminders and easy ways to follow up to make sure those action items get done.
• Excel doesn’t understand the organization’s reporting hierarchy, so it won’t provide managers with a simple view of what their teams are working on.

These are just a few examples -- some of which might be beyond what you're currently thinking about doing in a spreadsheet-based Scorecard or performance management framework. But support for these and other actions is critical if you really want to drive results. So here are some early warning signs that your performance management framework is starting to outgrow Excel:

• If you’ve started to think your single line “status” cells are not doing the trick, you are approaching the danger zone.
• If your users are adding a paragraph or two of explanation to a cell and making the spreadsheet unwieldy, you may be in trouble.
• If you are spending hours trying to format workbooks to print nicely, you are starting to feel the pain. 

Trying to create additional workbooks to hold longer explanations or to hold project milestones and status updates won’t solve the problem – it will make it worse. Maybe a very smart Excel administrator could overcome some of these problems. But, as you will see in my future posts, Excel's inability to drive action is only the tip of the iceberg.