Why specialist Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software?

Performance Management is all about taking action to achieve desired outcomes and objectives based on monitoring the actual performance results that are happening.

Specialist Corporate Performance Management software like Covalent is the only way to effectively consolidate KPIs, Actions, Risks and Governance into an integrated system that you can align with corporate strategy and departmental goals and objectives. Organisations sometimes try to use Business Intelligence (BI) tools or spreadsheets but they are simply not up to the job.

Sometimes Corporate Performance Management (CPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions are considered the same thing, but this misses some crucial differences. Essentially BI focuses on data management and CPM on management by data.

Business Intelligence (BI)

BI is all about data, and large volumes of it
BI tools are good for manipulating data from different perspectives, slicing and dicing data in different combinations and presenting results in (often) data-heavy tabular reports. Whilst the better BI tools will offer traffic-lighting to highlight results, the focus is totally on performance measures and not actions or risks. BI is most suited to data analysts and people looking for detailed performance data for one particular area of operations.

Corporate Performance Management (CPM)

CPM is all about performance information in fullest sense
not just the performance results, but the related commentaries and explanations, the linked action plans and risks, the mapping to specific business objectives. Most important is the CPM premise that there's too much data, and that in fact good Performance Management is all about focus on the 'vital few' rather than getting overloading with lots of irrelevant data. Also fundamental is offering a range of traffic-lighted personalised views of information – Dashboards, Scorecards, Strategy Maps – that give a context and build a full picture of overall corporate performance. CPM is ideally suited to Corporate and Departmental Management teams, and Boards of Directors, who just need to know about the big issues, not everything that's going on.

Why spreadsheets can't do CPM

The vast majority of organisations in both the public and commercial sectors are still relying on spreadsheets as their main tool for performance management. However, a consistent theme echoed by those organisations who have adopted Covalent is that spreadsheets are simply not appropriate tools for Performance Management as they are cumbersome, fragmented, labour-intensive, unreliable and inaccurate. There are three good reasons to say "No" to spreadsheets for CPM:

You won't get integrated…

What you'll have is all your performance data scattered across numerous spreadsheets on different people's PCs: KPI metrics in one, action plans in another, risk registers in a different one again. To properly monitor, measure and manage corporate performance, you need linkages between these related elements –holding everything in one single, specialist system gives you the whole picture, with interdependencies and relationships clearly shown, and aligned with corporate strategies and objectives

You'll waste a lot of time…

When you have performance data stored in multiple spreadsheets, it is complicated and labour-intensive to pull it all together for accurate and meaningful analysis. It is also extremely difficult to produce tailored reports for different audiences and to view performance data from multiple perspectives and in the context of overall performance against strategy and objectives. Many Covalent customers have told us how previously a person or team spent as much as one week in every month simply "updating the spreadsheets". Not only is this slow, inefficient and costly, but also creates huge scope for errors. A recent study by KPMG found more than 90% of spreadsheets contain errors.

You'll never get PM embedded…

Once staff get properly engaged and involved in performance management, the supporting information required quickly reaches a scale which spreadsheets simply cannot handle effectively. Spreadsheets can rapidly balloon into huge documents with manual colour-coding, complex embedded macros, calculations and formulas. They become slow and unwieldy to view, edit and update and prone to crashing. It also requires significant discipline and management for numerous individuals or teams to work from the same spreadsheet. People will quickly lose interest and find reasons to not do performance management.