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Professionals
Performance Management Glossary
One of the first steps to facilitating performance management success is to
ensure that your organization has a common language for talking about
performance. Below is a guide to key performance management terminology
and concepts to help get everyone on the same page.
Alerts: Notifications to email or to a home page, updating users to changes to
items that they have subscribed. Examples might include notifications about
performance changes or commentary.
Alignment: The act or state of being properly positioned, especially in
relation to one another; see also operational alignment.
Balanced Scorecard: One of the more prevalent methodologies in use
today, the Balanced Scorecard framework has three main tenets: 1)
emphasis on outcomes and objectives to be achieved, rather than measures;
2) separation of objectives into disparate, supporting points of view such as
Customer, Financial, Process, and Employee; and 3) consideration of nonfinancial
assets such as processes and intellectual property so that leading
and qualitative measures are also included.
Benchmarking: The comparison of similar processes across organizations
and industries to measure progress, identify best practices, and set
improvement targets. Results may serve as potential targets for key
performance indicators.
BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals): Often used to describe an
organization’s high-level, long-term aspirations, or vision.
Business performance management: A brand of performance management
that includes finance — covering compliance issues, competition, risk and
profitability — and human resources performance management —
encompassing employee performance appraisals and incentive
compensation. Other types of performance management include operational
performance management and IT performance management.
Cascading: The process of developing aligned goals throughout an
organization, connecting strategy to operations to tactics, allowing each
employee to demonstrate a contribution to overall organizational objectives.
Methods of cascading include identical (objectives and measures are
identical), contributory (translated, but congruent, objectives and measures),
unique (unique objectives and measures; do not link directly to parent) and
shared (jointly-shared unique objective or measure).
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