Performance improvement is both amazingly simple and frustratingly difficult. I say “amazingly simple” because of the effect where simply focusing attention on an area will lead to improvements. And of course, in terms of “frustratingly difficult”, we are all aware of the wall we run into where no matter what further actions we take, we no longer get returns on our efforts.

In researching some educational performance improvement dashboard projects, I came across a nice slide presentation that summarizes well three key steps for achieving performance improvement.

Let’s take a look at this case study.

The spirit and motivations behind the “No Child Left Behind” Act of 2001 served as the impetus to quite a few performance measurement and improvement projects in the world of public education. Today we look at a performance dashboard project and its presentation on ed.gov: Strategic Use of Data for Improvement in the School District of Philadelphia.

Basically stated, the goal of the project was to take the following three steps for ultimately improving performance:

1. Turn Data into Knowledge
2. Turn Knowledge into Action
3. Turn Action into Improvement

Hey, isn’t there a song? Turn, turn, turn….

Here are some graphics from the slide deck:

Tags: Continuous Improvement Process, School Dashboard, Performance Dashboards, Performance optimization, Performance Improvement dashboards, business intelligence dashboards, school dashboards, school metrics, student dashboard