What is PuMP?

Here’s what’s striking: almost every organisation struggling with KPIs is struggling with the same problems:

• The same vague goals nobody can measure
• The same brainstorming sessions that produce the same useless metrics
• The same dashboards that get updated dutifully and ignored completely

The pattern is unmistakable — and so is the cause. These problems don’t come from lack of effort or lack of data. They come from a set of common practices that simply don’t work.

The most common approaches to KPI development share a fundamental flaw: they skip some essential thinking.

Brainstorming measures in a workshop feels productive, but produces metrics that reflect what’s easy to count rather than what actually matters. Copying best-practice KPIs from another organisation skips the important work of understanding what your strategy actually requires. And contracting a dashboard tool assumes the measurement problem is a visualisation problem — when it almost never is.

Frameworks like the Balanced Scorecard and OKRs help clarify what you’re trying to achieve and that you should measure it. But they don’t tell you how to measure it. That gap is where most organisations get stuck — and where PuMP begins.

What PuMP actually is

Here’s a question worth sitting with: can you describe your organisation’s approach to choosing and using performance measures as a process?

Not a habit. Not a workshop. Not a framework. A deliberate, step-by-step process with a clear logic to it.

If the answer is no — or not really — that’s the gap PuMP fills. Most measurement approaches ask you to have KPIs. PuMP teaches you how to design them.

It’s an eight-step performance measurement methodology, refined over more than 30 years, that guides teams from clarifying what their strategy actually requires all the way through to reaching their performance targets. Practical enough to implement in-house. Rigorous enough to work every time.

The eight steps of PuMP

Each step tackles one of the core challenges in performance measurement head-on — replacing common practices that don’t work with techniques that do:

1. Understanding Measurement’s Purpose — establishing a shared “why” for measuring, so the whole team is genuinely on board.
2. Mapping Measurable Results — translating strategic goals into clear, focused, measurable results before choosing any measures.
3. Designing Meaningful Measures — choosing the fewest, most relevant measures that genuinely evidence each result.
4. Building Buy-In to Measures — involving stakeholders in a way that creates real ownership, not just sign-off.
5. Implementing Measures — documenting each measure as a single version of the truth, so data collection and measure calculation is clear and efficient.
6. Interpreting Signals from Measures — reading what your data is genuinely telling you, without reacting to noise.
7. Reporting Performance Measures — designing dashboards that answer three questions: what is performance doing, why, and how do we respond?
8. Reaching Performance Targets — using measures to guide improvement initiatives that close performance gaps and make results stick.

Want to see each step in action? Watch PuMP Creator Stacey Barr and PuMP Partner Mark Hocknell walk through the PuMP Blueprint in this webcast replay.

Why PuMP works

Three things make PuMP different from every other approach to performance measurement:

1. It’s a complete process. Every step that matters is covered, in the right order, with practical techniques that work. It’s built on practice, not theory.
2. It balances the technical and the human. PuMP doesn’t just produce better measures; it builds the understanding, ownership, and commitment that make those measures stick.
3. It builds capability in-house. PuMP removes the dependency on external consultants and makes meaningful measurement a skill your team owns permanently.

And if you’re already using a strategic management framework — Balanced Scorecard, OKRs, or anything else — PuMP works with it. It adds the measurement detail every other framework assumes you already have.

“Before PuMP, I didn’t have a way to measure how the organisation was functioning — or to tell the story that we’re doing what we said we’re going to do. PuMP brought our vision, mission, and values to life. Now we can actually see it. It’s tangible.”

Dell Anderson, Executive Director, Renew Behavioral Health and Wellness, Washington State, USA

What PuMP makes possible

When PuMP is working, something shifts. Measurement stops feeling like a reporting obligation and starts feeling like a genuine management tool — one that makes your strategy visible, your priorities clear, and your progress honest.

More specifically:

• Strategic goals that once felt impossible to quantify become measurable — and your team stops avoiding them
• Measures stop being done to people and start being owned by them — with the understanding and commitment that drives real action
• Performance reports stop being filed away and start driving the conversations that matter
• Data stops triggering debates about last month’s variance and starts revealing the signals that guide better decisions
• Targets stop feeling arbitrary and start feeling achievable — because everyone can see exactly what it will take to reach them

Ultimately, PuMP doesn’t just improve your KPIs. It gives your organisation the clarity, confidence, and capability to control its own results — and to achieve the impact it exists to create.

“Don’t underestimate the possibilities this methodology could provide you with. Think big, but start small — and don’t give up. It might sometimes feel too hard, but persevere, because it is absolutely worth it.”

Hanlie Erasmus, Associate Director of Public Library Services, State Library of South Australia

→I want to find out where my organisation’s measurement stands.

Take the free PuMP Diagnostic — practical, structured, and confronting in the best possible way. Calculate your Measurement Maturity Score and see exactly where your approach to measurement is strong, and where it’s letting your strategy down. You can do it yourself, or we can facilitate it for you:

→I want to see PuMP in action first.

Watch PuMP Creator Stacey Barr and PuMP Partner Mark Hocknell walk through all eight steps of the PuMP Blueprint in this webcast replay — practical, concrete, and the clearest hour you’ll spend on performance measurement.

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