Performance Management: Finding the Missing Pieces (to Close the Intelligence Gap)

Praise for Performance Management

"We are witnessing a convergence among advanced management concepts and practices. Performance management is a means to pull it all together, to understand the strengths and limitations of each management practice and leverage it for competitive advantage. Cokins’ book walks us through all this in a manner that makes something confusing much less so.
"There is no one right answer for any situation. The answer lies in a balance of concepts and the integration of them. Performance Management is the glue that holds them all together.
"This book helps the reader understand the breadth of PM. It’s not just about measuring!"
–– John F. Morrow, CPA, AICPA Vice President, The New Finance

"Gary Cokins has articulated the ‘411’ of performance management. His combination of personal anecdotes with fundamental cost and performance management theories provides business leaders at all levels, in any industry or profession, a solid resource for practicing their work.
"This book is not only an invaluable resource for those new to performance management but provides guidance, wisdom, support, and insight to all industry leaders and managers. Cokins has organized and simplified the many complex performance management theories, associated tools, and infrastructure for the reader.
"Buy it, read it, and give it to your colleagues–– then celebrate your successes!"
–– Sue Swertfeger, Senior Manager, Owens & Minor

Performance Management (PM) is the process of managing an organization’s strategy through a fully integrated system of business improvement methodologies supported by technology. PM encompasses the methodologies, metrics, processes, software tools, and systems that manage the performance of an organization. Written by a leading thinker and pioneer in cost and performance management, Performance Management shows corporations how to implement PM tools–or refine the ones they already have–to make better executive and operational decisions that will achieve greater results.

Describing the full vision of PM and how to reap the most benefits from it, Performance Management shows organizations how to use PM tools that have existed for decades or have become recently popular–such as balanced scorecards, Six Sigma, and activity-based management–to collect data, transform and model the data into information, and Web-report it to users. Author Gary Cokins exposes PM as not just an integrated set of improvement methodologies but also as a discipline intended to maintain a view of the larger picture and to understand how an organization works as a whole. PM can be successfully applied to managing any organization, including businesses, hospitals, universities, government agencies, military bodies, and every other entity that has employees and partners with a purpose.

In Performance Management, CEOs, CFOs, vice presidents, and managers discover:

• How to refine aspects of existing PM systems to work in harmony with newer components and apply "what-if" scenario modeling to them
• The explicit linkage between strategic, operational, and financial objectives, and how to communicate these linkages to managers and employee teams
• How to measure the profitability of customers and apply this knowledge to marketing strategies and campaigns
• How time, service level, cost, quality, and flexibility all interrelate with trade-offs
• How to align employee behavior to strategic objectives and motivate employees to accept strategy as everyone’s job
• How to test and validate the goals set by senior management

Performance Management shows senior managers how to use tools already in their grasp to navigate their organizations to the top of their game through better guidance, feedback, and decision-making.

GARY COKINS is a strategist for SAS, the world’s market leader in data management, business intelligence, and analytical software. He is an internationally recognizedexpert, speaker, and author on advanced cost management and performance improvement systems. Cokins has served on activity-based information committees with several organizations including: CAM-I, Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), American Production and Inventory Control Society (APICS), American Society for Quality (ASQ), Society of Manufacturing Engineers, American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), Institute of Industrial Engineers, and Purchasing Management Association of Canada. He is the author of four previous books: An ABC Manager’s Primer, Activity-Based Cost Management: Making It Work, Activity-Based Cost Management: An Executive’s Guide (Wiley), and Activity-Based Cost Management in Government.