Performance measures are the data points that support the achievement of a larger outcome or goal. At initial stages of evaluation, performance measures are usually easy to identify, as they relate directly to organizational outputs. When formulating performance measures, an organization should ask, “How do we know we’ve been successful?”
For example, your organization identifies fifty hours of training as one of your outputs. In order to assess whether you’ve successfully delivered this output, you might collect a series of performance measures including attendance rates, contact hours, and participant level 1 surveys that note opinions regarding the usefulness of the training.
Acceptable quality levels (AQLs) are the quantifiable standards that your organization has set for its own performance measures. For instance, your organization might say that, in order to be considered a successful training event, 100% of all registered participants must attend the training and 90% of training participants must agree that they would recommend the training to a coworker.
The development of AQLs should be a collaborative process, involving all those that play a role in implementing training or technical assistance events. After you have developed a level 1 survey tool and AQLs, you can begin to tabulate results and measure them against your organization’s standards of performance.