Weighing In Every Day?

Want to lose a few pounds? How often should you stand on a scale and track your weight? “If there’s one thing that comes up over and over with the thousands and thousands of patients enrolled in the Nation Weight Control Registry, it’s that weighing yourself each and every day on a scale has helped people lose weight and keep it off,” says Rena Wing, Ph.D., founder of the registry which includes over 5,000 people who shed an average of 66 pounds and kept it off for six years. “You don’t need to obsess over ounces every day, but keep track of the range – within two or three pounds – of what you weigh,” says Wing.

The lesson is the same for court performance measurement. Once you have taken the first four steps of building a court performance measurement system (CPMS) and identified the right performance measures, it is time to make sure that the measures gets into the hands of the right people at the right time. How frequently should the data for each measure be collected and made available to potential users? When do they need it and how often will they use it?
Who needs the performance data provided by the core measures and subordinate measures in the measurement hierarchies? How will they use that data?

Developing data collection and reporting timeframes for a court’s core performance measure is critical. It requires two things. First, determine the ideal timeframe for availability and use of the performance data for each core performance measure. (If availability of the scale is not a problem, why not track your weight daily?) Second, consider feasibility and costs of data collection and display and to adjust the ideal timeframe accordingly. The result should be a timeframe for collection and distribution of measures that maximizes performance.

See:

Real-Time Performance Data, Made2Measure, March 3, 2006

Core Measures and Measurement Hierarchies, December 31, 2005

Six-Step Process for Building an Effective Court Performance Measurement System, Made2Measure, October 15, 2005

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Copyright CourtMetrics 2006. All rights reserved.

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