Developing Performance Measures

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StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article |Performance Measures|Developing Performance MeasuresIn any industry, businesses pursue profits as a measure of success. However, profits can disguise many variations in effectiveness behind the scenes. In competitive sectors with a confluence of variables, businesses need strategies that reveal their performance over the long term. Without this, businesses will be adrift, lacking in focus or direction whilst their competitors get ahead. Developing performance measures is essential to allow businesses to develop strong strategies and continual performance at the top of their industry.

What Are Performance Indicators?

Performance indicators are deliberately structured measures to gauge your company’s performance in the long-term. Performance measures will have to be curated to the unique environment in which your company operates, the markets you’re operating in and the specific challenges of your sector.

“Once KPIs (key performance indicators) have been identified and constructed, they will help to determine the direction and focus of your business in its finance, operational and strategic objectives,” says Leonard Johnson, a writer at Last Minute Writing and Writinity. “These are key to a business’s continued high performance as well as the contextualization of your company within its sector.” Without KPIs businesses are adrift, lacking a sense of their direction and performance. Let’s take a look at how to effectively develop performance measures.

Identify Outcomes

To have meaningful performance measures, an organization needs a sense of the outcomes it wants to achieve. Rather than using abstract concepts to guide your strategy, find objective results that have clear indicators of success. Make sure that everyone on the team understands how each outcome is being understood as individuals can have radically different interpretations when it comes to identified outcomes.

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures eBook

Compare Measures

Recognizing that there are multiple measures for different outcomes enables you and your organization to select the measures that best express your objectives. “When comparing measures, you should be asking whether results can be measured directly or if you need a secondary measure that indicates performance in certain strategies,” says Jerry Dubose, a KPI expert at Draftbeyond and Research Papers UK. “If results can’t be measured directly, how you assess your performance can be based on the performance of indirect hypotheses that are linked to your outcomes.”

Tailor Measures To Objectives

When selecting the final measures your organization will use as performance indicators, there are a few criteria to consider. Metrics for your performance should be able to answer key questions about the orientation of your organization’s strategic decisions as well as providing actionable information that can guide future strategy. Negative consequences of your measures should be kept to a minimum, such as laborious data collection or incentivizing employee behaviour that “shortcuts” the objective.

Define Targets

Equally as important as selecting accurate performance measures is the process of defining the organizational targets your company needs to achieve. Targets should be aspirational, yet realistic and encourage everyone working in the organization to optimize their performance.

As well as identifying targets, a number of thresholds can be created with different action plans indicated by each. A minimum performance threshold can be as valuable as an aspirational target, or more so, when measuring organizational performance. A traffic light system of red, amber and green target/thresholds can provide a valuable visualization of performance as well as a motivator for when action and strategy needs to adapt.

Document Performance

Lastly, performance as related to defined outcomes needs to be documented. These documents can be issued quarterly and will become valuable for reflection on past performance as well as an indicator of future trajectory. Documentation should be systematic and complete – a data definition table provides an excellent structure for overarching documentation of performance. Software can streamline performance documentation as well as create compact performance reports that will indicate how strategy is performing.

Wrapping Up

Developing performance measures should be a cornerstone of every business looking to secure their future. In a fast-changing world, organizations need to have a strategic approach to development and objective ways to assess their performance, otherwise fluctuations in market environments can catch you out. This approach to developing performance measures, as articulated in the article above, will strengthen your business and enable resilience in the face of an unpredictable world.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor |Ronald CainRonald Cain is a tutor at UK Essay Writing Services. He is a professional writer, a blogger, and a contributor to Gum Essays. His passion for communication and organizational strategy has led him to roles which support businesses in achieving selected outcomes and, for Ronald, nothing comes close to the thrill of success in a competitive environment.

How Often Should You Update Your IT Systems?

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Management Article |IT Systems|How Often Should You Update Your IT Systems?Your IT infrastructure plays a significant role in maximizing productivity within your business. Further to this, the company’s various IT systems are also responsible for ensuring security and protection against opportunistic, yet sophisticated cybercriminals.

Keeping your IT systems up to date should be a top priority in order to ensure they are fulfilling their different duties at their fullest capacity. The question is, how often should these updates be taking place? Here is everything that you need to know.

It depends on the IT systems in question

Most IT infrastructures are comprised of a number of different IT systems and components, and each of these systems and components will need to be updated or upgraded at different times, and some more frequently than others. For example, your operating system (OS) software should be updated as soon as new updates are released. Luckily, most operating systems are rather adept at updating themselves automatically.

Virus and malware protection software, on the other hand, will usually only need to be updated once a year, although this varies from provider to provider. In some cases, you might need to allow small updates to take place every few weeks.

Updating vs. upgrading

There is a huge difference between updating and upgrading your IT systems, although both processes are just as important! Updates are generally required a lot more frequently than upgrades. Updates revolve around improving your existing IT systems and software, while upgrades revolve around transitioning to brand new IT systems and software in order to reap the benefits of advanced technology. Most upgrades should take place every few years, or when there is a major breakthrough in technology. These technological breakthroughs are important to investigate, especially if it becomes evident that your competitors are rushing to embrace the latest advancement.

In the vast majority of cases, you will be notified directly when it is time to update your systems and software. Unfortunately, however, it is less clear-cut when trying to figure out when the time is right to invest in IT infrastructure upgrades. This is why it helps to enlist IT support for businesses from an expert IT services company. The employees working at one of these companies will be equipped to advise you in terms of:

  • When your existing systems are no longer functioning optimally and productivity is suffering as a result
  • When there is new technology available that could provide your business with an advantage
  • When your existing systems or software are reaching the end of their ‘life cycle’
  • When your systems or software no longer cover all aspects of your operations
  • How to upgrade when your business is expanding or embracing a new opportunity for growth

The right IT support means that you do not have to worry about trying to find out how often updates and upgrades should be occurring. Your outsourced IT support team will be there to guide you along the way, offering greater peace of mind, improved productivity, and reliable protection against the ever-growing threats to cybersecurity.

PowerPoint Strategies – How to Create a Data-Driven Presentation

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StrategyDriven Business Communications Management Article |Powerpoint Strategy|PowerPoint Strategies – How to Create a Data-Driven PresentationPresenting information can be done in several different ways with high-end softwares and extensive tools on the internet. With the help of these infrastructures, design and the display gets full points. But do these highly-captivatingly prepared presentations actually pass the message through or just intrigue the audience? The answer is that even though most presentations make people and shareholders get in awe with it, but leave them with several questions and confusion. And when this happens, people either become displeased with your presentations or make diverse decisions about it.

Your presentations must not only be crystal clear and captivating but must come with highly supportive data. It’s true that finding supportive data that is also resourceful can include extensive research and take time, but many times it is needed and required. Other times, it can be a professional addition to the presentation that makes it knowledgeable. While there are several other benefits of a data-driven presentation, we believe that you may have grasped the idea by now. So let’s move onto how your presentations can be more data-driven than design replete:

Simplify the Grounds

Before placing your data and while constructing your designs, make sure to understand the space your ideas will take and make way for them. This means that you must build a presentation space that can include the data clearly without splitting it up in weird sentences or unrecognizable places. For inspiration on well-formatted presentations, you can view some samples online or get help from quality presentation design services with the know-how. If the result of the data and design combined comes out distorted or even slightly awkward, make sure to redesign it quickly.

Identify Your Purpose

Or the presentation’s purpose. Think about the exhibition as an entity that can speak for itself. For this, you have to identify and stay stern on the meaning of the presentation. Many times adding too much information into one presentation can confuse the preparer and make them transcend far away from the cause. For this reason, it’s best to write the ideas down first and craft the purpose efficiently to not stray away from it.

Highlight the Main Takeaways

Unlike an article or a pdf on the web, your presentation needs to be interactive and highly comprehendible. This is due to the fact that presentations are given in a set amount of time and should be mostly intuitive for attendees to understand the concept quickly and positively. For this reason, a data-driven presentation must have a thorough analysis of a point and must highlight the key facts for fast coherence. In the end, there should be an area for takeaways that is simple yet comprehensive enough.

Smarten the Data

Data is always in the raw form when collected and needs to be streamlined to create a natural flow from it. In a presentation, the data you collect needs to be distributed efficiently in tables and charts. For this reason, it needs to be divided, trimmed, and brushed up where needed to make sense out of it. In order to create a data-driven module, you need to filter the data to your audience’s liking and make it aim towards the purpose. You can start by first sorting out the data and place it in different categories. Then gradually add it to each slide by necessity.

Title Your Information Nicely

A data-focused presentation is never a bad idea that gives out copious information and supports the statements well. However, this data should be marked efficiently to create a sensible outlook. This should be done by careful titling the charts and graphs as well as written material. Always make short descriptions of your data to make it more comprehensive even for people who are far seated or enter the room late.
This also creates a uniform look to make the presentation proposal be seen through. Furthermore, try to look at ways presentations can be made more efficient by observing these tips https://www.skillsyouneed.com/present/presentation-tips.html.

Choose Charts Carefully

Charts and graphs in excel are impendent for showcasing data the right way. In addition to giving out written forms, it’s wise to choose visual charts that present data in simplified and intuitively understandable means. However, make sure that you choose the right kind of bar, line, or pie charts for the display of data. While bar and line charts are the most straightforward, pie charts can also be highly natural but only in certain situations.

Go in Depth

Making presentations that easily get through can be a skill in itself. It needs an eye to detail as well as an eye to the boundary. Talking about specifics, for a data-driven presentation, a slide can go more in-depth than any other aspects. To prove your point, don’t hesitate to include as much information as needed. Or hand out more data in the form of presentation flyers to make your point. Make all the data captivating enough that the audience doesn’t lose interest due to the length and help them go into detail to understand all technicalities.

Describe Developments

Each style of facts or statistics presentation comes with its specifications to be followed. Similarly, there are specific ways to make a data-driven presentation to make it engaging. In every piece of information, there is a part that has the biggest impact by being an amazing or fascinating fact. Likewise, you need to choose these development points where the information is going somewhere and highlight it from your data. This information can be anything that needs more attention to make it stand out.

Make an Intriguing Story

Lastly, when creating a data-driven presentation, you need to strategize your slides of graphs and charts in such a way that it becomes a fascinating story. Nothing can be more engaging than a show that has a story-like interface and a lesson at the end.

You can create a story-like streamlined structure of a presentation that builds as it moves along, and in the end, the purpose is clear, and there is something in it for everyone. Such a structure can help your data-filled presentation be appealing enough to make its purpose successful.

How to Maintain the Trust Of Your Customers

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Trust|How to Maintain the Trust Of Your CustomersThere are many different aspects that contribute to a company’s overall success or failure. The strength of the idea, the execution of those ideas, and, yes, the trust that is held between the company and the customers. This last point is actually pretty underrated. It has such a big impact on a company’s success, yet the trust isn’t just given — it has to be earned, and it can also be lost, if the business isn’t careful. In this blog, we’re going to take a look at a few key ways that you keep the trust of your customers.

No Hidden Fees

Nobody likes to feel like they’re being ripped off, or they’re being cheated. There’s sometimes a temptation to add extra charges to a customer’s order, because it’ll ultimately benefit the bottom line. But let’s be realistic for a moment. While adding a last-minute charge will boost your profits on a short-term basis, it’ll hurt them on a long-term basis. That’s because it’ll cost you a customer, and maybe even earn you some bad reviews. People much prefer to know the true cost up front, so make sure that’s what they get.

Be Honest

Even the best companies in the world make mistakes. There’s no such thing as perfection, after all. There’s sometimes a temptation to run from our mistakes, and we can see why — it’s much easier to bury your head in the sand, rather than confront an issue. But it’s important to be honest with your customers if there’s an issue that affects them. If you experience a cyber security breach, then let the affected customers know as soon as possible. It’s part of the duty of care you have to the customers that have trusted you with their financial information and other sensitive details.

Keep Pushing Forward

When it comes to your customers, you don’t want them to just trust that you’re not going to screw them over. You want them to trust that you’re the best in town. It’s all good and well to have customers that have a positive impression of your intentions, but if they don’t trust your capabilities, then there’ll only be so far that you can go. As such, it’s important not to rest on your laurels. Instead, keep on pushing forward. Your customers might like what you’re doing right now, but they’ll only feel the same way in five years if you’re continuing to push forward.

Stay True

Ultimately, it’s all about staying honest — to your customers, yes, but also to yourself. What does your company stand for? What principles guide you through the future? If you keep these things at the forefront of your mind, then you’ll find that it’s much easier to retain the trust of your customers, since they’ll have no reason to doubt your intentions. You’ll be operating from a place of sincerity. And if people know that what they see is what they get, then they’ll have no reason to doubt what you’re saying and doing.

Boost Your Social Media Presence For Future Success

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Boost Your Social Media Presence For Future Success

A profitable Social Media Marketing Strategy should help you achieve the objectives you have penned out for your business. For this, it has to be dynamic to adjust to the variations that occur in the media every day. And of course, you must contemplate every novelty and detail in terms of Social Networks in order to get the most out of them. Use these strategies across the board with your website to ultimately boost your SEO.

Use data from last year to inform this year’s strategy.

See the success (or failure) of the social media campaigns you created last year, as well as the activity and engagement across all of your platforms. What type of content resonated the most with your audience? What social media website seems to be growing faster? You can do this by conducting a social media audit. An audit keeps you informed of your social presence to see what works and what doesn’t. Based on the data reports from the previous year, you may want to change your publication time to reach your target audience more and get more engagement. Or, you may want to focus on Facebook more than Instagram due to a more consistent return on investment (ROI) on one platform versus the other. The point is to allow the data from last year to give you a better orientation for the new year. For a comprehensive overview of all your social media metrics in one place, you can visit Hootsuite Analytics.

StrategyDriven's Social Media Publication Timing Whitepaper

Look for inspiration in unconventional places.

We’ve already said it: a big part of social media marketing is keeping moving forward and coming up with new ideas to keep your channels up to date. The right way for creativity to flow is to look to others for inspiration. If your brand works significantly with imagery and innovative graphic solutions, you may want to look at a virtual photo booth that would translate well to your web page.

Take note of thought leaders and industry giants, but also strive to look outside of these grounds. Retailers generally have a large budget for social media and creative purposes, which allows them to try new things and push the boundaries. These brands also have a tangible product that they can showcase on their social channels. Brands like Everlane and Urban Outfitters are among the favorites. As of 2020, the top five social media trends are:

  1. Paid social networks
  2. Ambassador employee
  3. Training for social networks
  4. CEOs on social media
  5. Sales on social networks

Of course, not all of them will be the objectives of your company or brand. For example, social media sales work well in the financial industry, where advisors need to build long-term relationships with clients. But it may not work very well in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, which is less reliant on relationships between leads and sales professionals. However, these are ideas that you can use and rework to ensure that your brand is hitting the social targets that you dreamed of when you began.