Performance Indicators

Do you want to use performance indicators, define performance criteria or specify performance standards?
Not all project managers and evaluators will necessarily want to use performance indicators and performance criteria. They may or may not be appropriate but their use is increasingly perceived as `good practice’.  However, they will almost certainly be more relevant when the purpose of the evaluation is about accountability and may be a requirement of funding or accreditation systems.

Numbers

Performance indicators are (usually) based on some sort of numerical `evidence’ of achievement. If any sort of statistical analysis of data is planned then this sort of sophistication is necessary and the base line for work in this field is `hypothesis testing statistics’ which is a technical area of study.  However, for our purposes we are going to limit ourselves to the idea of performance indicators as, roughly speaking, `counting things’ to prove a point!
We need to think about performance indicators before we think about data collection methods as otherwise you run the risk of collecting a whole lot of data only to find that you have counted the wrong things.
Performance indicators are frequently expressed as ratios.  For example, the number of people accessing an advice service after a poster campaign: number accessing it beforehand may be a measure of the effectiveness of the campaign.  `May be’ is a key phrase because it is rarely the case that one indicator can `prove’ anything.  Trying to establish unequivocal causal relationships is extremely difficult in community development type projects and you usually need several different indicators before you can draw conclusions with confidence.
There are many possible things you can count – ultimately they will be dictated by the purpose of the project.  However, the following list, loosely based on one from a Web site called the Training Zone.com, may be useful - at least they may stimulate some ideas.
Alternatively, each of the examples of `performance dimensions’ listed above could be used as a basis for counting things
E.g. New services > number of services > number of people accessing the service(s) > average number of times the service is accessed > number of referrals > number of `problems’ dealt with > average duration of contact etc.