Making Performance Measurement Meaningful
This is the continuation of the transcript of an in-person customer seminar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Performance Management Best Practices." The speaker is Christopher Wren, Principal Consultant at TFI Consulting.
This is why the title of the session is making performance measurement meaningful. A performance measure is a meaningless diagnostic tool, until you pick it up and start using it. It has no more value to you in organizational life than this stethoscope has value to a doctor if they are not using it because the value is not measured. The value is in the question that it forces you to ask about how we are performing.
And folks, this is the key failure point that I see in organizations, and I travel all over the world. This is the key failure point. We do a tremendous amount of work creating our documents and creating our measures, and we have them printed up in four colors, and we bind them, and give them a cool sexy cover. I know you’ve seen it, right?
And then we say look, we’re done. Look how well we are managed. Look at all these measures, and all it is, folks, is a meaningless diagnostic tool until you pick it up and start using it.
Using Performance Measurement Effectively
So if I was going to use this on him, I’d pick it up, put it on my ears, and I would start asking him some questions, wouldn’t I? You have a family history of heart disease? What kind of medications are you taking? Do you diet? Do you exercise? And based on what I am learning from him, I am going to prescribe an intervention. I’m going to put him on Lipitor, and tell him to diet and exercise, whatever.
I’m going to say come back to me in three months and let’s do it again. What am I going to do when he comes back? I’m going to apply the measurement tools, and see if we made a difference. Really keep this in mind folks, a performance measure only orients you to performance in order to become performance informed.
Take yourself to that fifth level of development. You’ve got to start using them, using them, using them, using them. This is how we truly become learning organizations because all you’ve got right now is a bunch of stethoscopes if you are not engaging the workforce in a conversation on how do we use them and what we are going do about it? Everybody with me on that? Okay, good. I’m kind of hit the accelerator here a little bit. Okay. I said all that, and you get these slides yourself. So here’s what we do.
We get all these measures in place and we take them to the workforce and say boom, start measuring. And we assign them to managers, what’s wrong with that model folks? Yeah, we’re working on it. If I were to take this and give it you, and say use this on the person sitting to your right. If she has no medical training, I just set her up for what?
A failure, big time, and this is what we do in our organizational life folks, we create all these measures, and we take it to our managers and we say start measuring. And if we do not train them on how to use them, how to begin asking intelligent questions, and what are we learning from this?
We just set them up for what? What do we set up him for? Value. And you know what happens? They cook the books in order to hit their mark. That’s true. They cook the books in order to hit their mark. And I have a word for that, you are ready? We’re lying. We’re lying. So if we’re not using these tools in an honest effort to improve performance then folks why we’re doing it. Why you’re doing it?
If the difference is you are making makes no difference, what’s the difference? So what you have got to do is train your managers on how to use them. When I work with organizations, we’ll train at least 10% of the managers on how to begin asking questions. Diagnostics is what I call it. How you use these measures, These meaningful tools to learn and grow? I want you to think about that. Are you training your managers on how to use your measures? Are you just pushing them on them, or do they even know that they are being measured? What do you think? Anybody? Think about it. Okay. Last, but not the least.
An Ash Pond Remediation Service Company Switching From Sisense to InetSoft for Performance Measurement Needs
The Ash Pond Remediation service company’s move from Sisense to InetSoft started as a reaction to two painful realities: slow, brittle dashboards during peak cleanup campaigns and the rising headache of stitching together time-series sensor data with lab results and contractor invoices. Remediation projects generate very different data shapes — high-frequency groundwater monitoring, periodic heavy-metal lab assays, contractor daily logs, and equipment telematics — and Sisense’s architecture in this deployment struggled with frequent schema changes and complex joins. InetSoft’s mashup-focused model fit the problem like a glove: teams could rapidly blend streaming sensor feeds, LIMS outputs, and billing data in a single semantic layer and publish purpose-built performance-measurement dashboards without a full ETL rework every time a monitoring well got added or a vendor workflow changed.
From a performance standpoint, InetSoft brought tangible advantages. The remediation group relies on near-real-time KPIs (containment-line breaches, percent of excavated volume vs. schedule, solvent recovery efficiency, and exceedance-event frequency) that need fast aggregation across millions of rows of sensor and event data. InetSoft’s caching, incremental refresh, and push-down query capabilities kept these dashboards snappy where Sisense had begun to time out on complex ancestry queries (for example, tracing contaminant spikes from discharge event to specific dredge runs). This responsiveness changed behavior in the field: project managers trusted the live dashboards enough to re-sequence crews and redeploy containment booms within hours of a detected anomaly, rather than waiting for next-day reconciliations.
The migration itself was pragmatic and prioritized impact. The company inventoried Sisense reports and rebuilt the 30 most-used operational and compliance views first—daily remediation scorecards, permit-exceedance trackers, contractor productivity leaderboards, and a consolidated regulatory export for state auditors. InetSoft’s reusable calculation framework (standardized mass-balance formulas, time-windowed exceedance logic, and normalized unit conversions) reduced duplication and improved governance: a single, audited definition of “percent excavated” now feeds the PMO, the finance team, and state reporting with identical numbers. Role-based access controls also mattered: field techs see only the wells and equipment in their zone, vendors see their task-level KPIs, and regulators receive read-only packages formatted for permit compliance without exposing internal cost or bid data.
Beyond tooling, the switch nudged a cultural shift that mattered most. With faster, trusted insights, engineers began iterating on containment strategies directly inside dashboards—testing hypotheses about liner integrity or dewatering rates before formalizing process changes—while data engineering focused on hardening connectors rather than patching reports. Financial benefits followed: fewer emergency mobilizations, tighter contractor SLAs, and more accurate accruals for long-tail remediation liabilities. In my view, swapping Sisense for InetSoft wasn’t merely a platform swap for this ash-pond specialist; it was an upgrade to an operating rhythm where measurement, compliance, and field action close the loop in hours instead of days, and where analytics becomes a daily decision instrument instead of a monthly audit exercise.