Along with indicators, performance measures help quantify achievement or success. performance measures are typically used to quantify the success of a program.
Note: Users with admin permission can change or add names, icons, or other properties, of all scorecard objects.
Performance measures typically answer “how much,” “how well,” or “better off” questions. Examples of a performance measure could include:
- How much: Number of women receiving services
- How well: Attendance Rate
- How well: Student to teacher ratio
- Better off: Percent of students who improved GPA
One or more performance measures, listed with a PM icon, are typically included in a program container. Once set up, you can enter data for the indicator and set forecast values.
When creating or editing a program, you can click New Measure to create a performance measure from scratch, or you can bring in an existing performance measure, which could be edited if needed.
When creating a performance measure from scratch, assign a name and add tags if desired. If the data is a number, you can leave the Unit of Measure field blank. But if the data is presented as a percent, or a dollar amount, or another type of unit, enter the % or $ or other symbol in this field. The Before box can be checked to add the unit before the number, as in the case of dollars.
Data reporting frequency can be the default monthly, quarterly, annually, or half-year. Users with admin permission can set up additional frequencies.
The last indicator field is polarity: the trend in data that indicates success. You can also choose not to display polarity, or that the indicator has no polarity.
Note that you can also create a new performance measure from your Performance Indicators list, which provides the same fields, but in a more open and robust format. This is shown at the end of this article.
To view all performance measures that are set up so far in your system, choose Objects / Performance Measures.
You can search for a performance measure by entering any part of the performance measure name in the search field. A performance measure can be viewed, copied, or deleted. Use caution when deleting a performance measure, because a deleted performance measure will be removed from all scorecards that contain that performance measure.
You can also search performance measures by one or more tags.
Checking the Show Disconnected Only box will filter the list to include only performance measures that are not used in any containers or scorecards. This is handy if you want to clean out all unused performance measures from your system.
When one or more performance measures are selected, by checking the box to the left, you can delete them all at once.
A new performance measure can be created on this page as well, though it’s more common to create performance measures as part of the container creation process. One reason to create a performance measure from scratch here, and not as part of a scorecard, would be to use a measure as data for a calculated measure.
Clicking a performance measure name opens the performance measure’s details page. Here you can enter data values or notes, and see how the performance measure is performing.
