Using Smart Charts

Using Smart Charts Program

How to get the truth from your KPIs!

Create the singularly most powerful chart for your KPIs and dramatically increase the speed and impact of performance improvement.

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Our most-asked question is how to develop meaningful performance measures. But no matter how meaningful they are, how well-aligned to strategy they are, how engaged with them people are, how beautifully presented on a dashboard they are, KPIs will do more damage than good if they aren’t telling you the truth.

When a KPI doesn’t tell the truth, you can’t take the right action. You might find it’s hard to get everyone to agree on when and how to respond to a KPI. You might end up taking action when you don’t need to, which wastes the money, time and effort you’re already spreading too thin. And there are also times when you don’t take action, without realising you actually need to prevent an emerging problem from getting worse.

Most KPIs aren’t able to tell you the truth…

The big problem is when we don’t even realise our KPIs are not telling the truth. And, it might be hard to believe, but with our typical and traditional ways of analysing data and interpreting KPIs, most KPIs are not able to tell us the truth! This means that:

• We can be unknowingly misled by popular KPI presentation methods, such as trend lines and month-to-month variances
• We can end up making performance worse (not better) by continually comparing each KPI value to targets
• We miss out on the opportunity to directly and quantitatively measure the impact of initiatives and improvement projects to find out if they really are worth the time and money

We can put all this wasted money, time and effort behind us with a simple change in how we visually display our KPIs.

There is one chart we use in PuMP that will get the truth out of your KPIs, and give you back the power to improve performance. We call it the Smart Chart. It’s really a XmR chart, part of a field of statistical theory that has been widely used and thoroughly proven over more than a century. These charts have actually been used by world-class companies for decades, but has flown under the performance management radar for too long.

And it’s worth mentioning that, rather than the traditional focus that XmR training has on manufacturing, this Using Smart Charts training is much more targeted at the KPIs and performance measures we use to execute strategy, manage operations, and continually improve our work processes.

Using Smart Charts gives you all you need to know.

We go deeper into Smart Charts in this program, compared to our basic introduction in the PuMP Blueprint. There are heaps of examples, live demonstrations, hands-on activities, and opportunity for discussion and Q&A. You will learn these XmR charts deliberately and accurately, but also in a very easy and fun way.

To see all topics covered in the Using Smart Charts program, click to expand the section below:

What’s included:

• Step-by-step instructions and demonstration of how to create the Smart Chart for virtually all your KPIs, without special software or statistical skills.
• How to use the Excel template for Smart Charts, and creating your first Smart Charts for your own KPIs using this template
• A checklist of the basic and more advanced interpretation rules that make the Smart Chart the easiest chart to interpret quickly, accurately, consistently and with confidence every time.
• The broad range of KPI types that suit Smart Charts and how to know when it’s not appropriate to use Smart Charts.
• How target setting becomes a breeze and a nifty new way to put targets on your KPI graphs that uses fewer pixels but conveys more information.
• How to put Smart Charts into your performance dashboards to achieve simultaneously what the popular space-saving sparklines and bullet graphs currently achieve together.

It’s like a guided implementation…

You’re also supported by an easy to follow and detailed how-to workbook, plus an Excel Smart Charts template ready to quickly create beautiful XmR charts for your KPIs.

Using Smart Charts is a practical, get-it-done kind of course: think about it as a guided implementation. It will get you using Smart Charts straight away, in the right way, on real KPIs, so you can improve performance with more speed and impact than ever before. When you find your first insight from one KPI in these charts, you’ll get your investment back many times over!

Your Using Smart Charts expert team…

Using Smart Charts Creator

Stacey Barr is a specialist in evidence-based leadership and organisational performance measurement. Stacey is the creator of PuMP and its suite of programs, host of PuMP Academy, and author of two books, Practical Performance Measurement and Prove It! Starting her career as a statistician inspired Stacey to build statistical rigour into the PuMP methodology, and also this Using Smart Charts course. Her Smart Chart methodology was reviewed by modern-day XmR chart expert, Donald Wheeler, to ensure its validity.

Using Smart Charts Trainer & Coach

Ayça Tümer Arıkan is a licensed PuMP Contractor, and has worked as a measurement consultant and mentor since 2017 to help companies in their journey to become high performing organisations with the use of measurement in a meaningful way. Ayça is a statistician with an MBA degree, and has the perfect expertise to help review and update this Using Smart Charts training and also become the official trainer and coach for this program.

Join our upcoming live program…

If the timing of this Using Smart Charts program in June doesn’t work for you, please request we run another at a time that does suit you:

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected].