How Do You Solve a Problem Like . . . KPIs?

I recently had the pleasure of spending a day with colleagues talking in depth to a vice-chancellor from a well-known UK university about key challenges facing UK higher education.  This was in the context of the Blackboard Outcomes System and its role in supporting planning and assessment processes.

Before detailing those conversations with you, however, I’d like to briefly discuss a popular news story here in the UK which, after reading, I find myself contemplating questions similar to those in assessment processes.

As Andrew Lloyd Webber’s revival of the musical “The Sound of Music” nears the end of its run in London, swansong news articles published last week reflected on the performance of the show’s star, Connie Fisher.  Fans of reality TV, especially programmes with live audition eliminator formats, probably remember Ms. Fisher from “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria,” which ran in prime time on the BBC in 2006.  That show turned out to be the trailer for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s revival and produced a “West End Musical Star out of a call centre worker”: Connie Fisher.

The news stories I read played on the dramatic tension of an “amateur” playing the role of a professional, intimating:

• Could someone without a conventional formal theatrical training history ever achieve an acceptable level of performance?
• Now that the show is coming to an end, is it effectively the end of Fisher’s career?

That news coverage set me thinking again about what constitutes “acceptable performance,” by what criteria, and how that is measured.  In short, how do you know something is good?

While talking in-depth with colleagues and the vice-chancellor about key challenges facing UK higher education, we kept coming back to the same problem – the business techniques through which UK universities are increasingly managed boil down to the ability to:

1. Frame a set of key performance indicators (KPIs)
2. Achieve some level of global understanding of what they are
3. Execute on the goals that you set to achieve them

In the world of the student, the understanding and execution is largely a question of the feedback that you receive to support your academic performance and achievement:

• Are you a call centre worker transformed overnight into a musical star, who, by any measure, would see this as over-achievement given prior attainment (making and receiving phone calls, eight hours a day)?
• Or are you a wannabe who will never “make the standard” no matter what you achieved (due to prior attainment!)?

Applying these types of questions to education: As a student, what distance are you travelling and under whose performance system?  Are you measuring by stage, or age?

Performance indicators shift depending on audience and perspective, but the art of their management is the challenge facing every business leader, vice-chancellor, dean, teacher, team captain, squaddie and student.  Having the courage and ability to identify and set meaningful KPIs, to work to them, evaluate and refresh them, reset your plan and start again, undoubtedly supported by technology, is a core competence of the clear-headed in any organisation.

So, I pose these questions to you to contemplate this week:

• Which indicators are you working to personally, who understands these, and how do you track them?
• What is on your dashboard and how is feedback improving (or impeding) your performance?