Acerca de bons gráficos

Quando se tem um balanced scorecard, quando se segue um conjunto de indicadores é fundamental não cometer um dos pecados capitais da monitorização, é fundamental olhar para gráficos e não só para tabelas de números (recordar os três erros mais comuns na apresentação de resultados).
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Com Stephen Few e Eduard Tufte aprendi algumas regras importantes a seguir acerca dos gráficos.
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Em "Real Chart Rules to Follow" reencontramos algumas dessas regras.

Uma alternativa barata e flexível

Desde há muito que exponho aqui no blogue a minha opinião sobre o software que se encontra por aí para apresentar os resultados dos indicadores do balanced scorecard. Por exemplo, basta recordar "BSC e software" e os 3 erros mais comuns na apresentação de resultados.

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Pois bem, com o auxílio desta macro "Sparklines for Excel (R)" conseguem-se fazer pequenas maravilhas:

Muito mais interessante que as microcharts (sparklines) que vêm incorporadas com o Excel 2010.

How to Spot a Bad Strategy

Há mais de dez anos li o livro "Keeping Score" de Mark Graham Brown. Ainda hoje o cito, nomeadamente acerca dos três erros mais comuns que se cometem quando se monitoriza o desempenho.

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Por isso, estou sempre atento ao que escreve: "How to Spot a Bad Strategy"

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"Mistake # 1: Failure to Get External Opinions on Strategy"

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"Mistake # 2: Measuring Strategies With Activity Metrics" (Moi ici: esta é tão comum nas organizações portuguesas)

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"The big mistake all of these organizations (including my own) are making is to judge the success of a strategy by measuring milestones, activities, or behaviors associated with the chosen strategy. You can complete all the activities on time and in the right number and still not achieve the goal."

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"Mistake # 3: Measuring Strategy With Only Outcome Metrics
This is probably even more common than tracking activities as a way to tell if you’ve picked the right strategy. For many organizations, the only way to tell if a strategy worked is to look at lagging outcome metrics like revenue, profits, or market share. It’s true that often these things are the ultimate goal or reason for the strategy. However, by the time you find out if the strategy worked, it is too late if this is all you measure."

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"# 1 Best Practice for Spotting Bad Strategies – Logic!!
It’s amazing to me how little thought and logic go into many strategies I’ve seen in big organizations. Often the overall goals for growth, market share and profit are handed down from on high by the executives, board, or parent organization. We usually don’t have much say in these, regardless of how stupid they might be. For example, I remember talking with a well-known Fortune 100 technology firm right after the internet bubble burst in the mid 1990s and they still had a goal of 50 percent sales growth over the previous year! (Moi ici: Been there saw that) The best and easiest way of spotting a bad strategy is logic and reason. It’s hard for outsiders to understand how some big smart organizations can make such stupid decisions sometimes when coming up with strategies. Apparently some of these strategies are decided on without much in the way of a logical analysis. Some organizations rely on the nice diagrams with circles and arrows called “strategy maps” to think through their strategies. These diagrams are created in flipcharts with a team of experts and they look very scientific, but most are nothing more than a series of broad assumptions drawn on charts with arrows used to indicate causal relationships.

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"So the flaw here is that no one is asking for evidence or even a logic test to evaluate each of the assumptions or theories in this strategy map. ... The bottom line is that someone needs to evaluate your strategies with a critical eye and Mr. Spock logic to test all of the assumptions that have been made and ask for data/evidence to support them."

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"# 2 Best Practice for Spotting Bad Strategies – Lack of Knowledge/ Experience/Success
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The further you stray from your roots, or what you currently do, the greater your chances for failure.

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One of the simplest ways of spotting a bad strategy is to compare the strategy with the organization’s track record for success. This is what scares most people about a government-run healthcare system.

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Strategies should be selected based on the likelihood that the organization can make them work. The chances of any strategy being successful do include factors like luck and timing, but experience is probably the most important variable. This is where outsiders are sometimes valuable because they can ask the hard questions like: “What makes you think you can pull this off when you have never done anything like this before?” It’s hard to ask questions like this when you are inside the organization – you might be viewed as not being a “team player”.

# 3 Best Practice For Spotting Bad Strategies – Better Strategic Metrics"