Business Performance Management Cheat Sheet 2026

The 30 highest-yield Business Performance Management facts, distilled from real exam questions. Print it, save it as a PDF, or study it here — free, no sign-up.

1. What is the role of a 'Strategy Management Office (SMO)' in large organizations? → To oversee the development, communication, and execution of organizational strategy
2. In the Balanced Scorecard, 'employee skills index' would most likely appear in which perspective? → Learning and growth perspective
3. What does 'on-time delivery rate' primarily measure in supply chain performance? → Supplier reliability and operational efficiency
4. Which KPI would BEST indicate the health of a company's innovation pipeline? → Percentage of revenue from new products launched in the last 3 years
5. Which approach to strategy execution emphasizes breaking long-term goals into 90-day planning cycles? → OKR quarterly cycles
6. Who developed the Balanced Scorecard framework? → Robert Kaplan and David Norton
7. Over the years, Google has made a lot of adjustments to its performance management system. One of the novel strategies is: → Transferable Stock Options
8. What is the primary risk of tracking too many KPIs simultaneously? → Distraction from truly critical performance drivers
9. In portfolio management, BCG Matrix categorizes business units as: → Stars, Cash Cows, Question Marks, Dogs
10. Which performance measure expresses profit as a percentage of revenue? → Net profit margin
11. What is a 'strategic gap' in performance management? → The difference between desired future performance and current performance
12. What is the role of a 'drill-down' feature in a BI dashboard? → To navigate from summary-level data to more detailed underlying information
13. Which of the following is/are the purposes for which Adobe introduced Check-In? → All of the above
14. Performance evaluation is the foundation for __________. → Promotion
15. Which analytical technique groups data points with similar characteristics together? → Cluster analysis
16. What is the primary advantage of the Balanced Scorecard over purely financial performance measurement? → It incorporates non-financial drivers that lead to future financial success
17. Which visualization type is most appropriate for showing the proportion of parts to a whole? → Pie chart
18. Which metric is most commonly used to measure the effectiveness of a business intelligence implementation? → Return on investment (ROI) from improved decision-making
19. A KPI dashboard should primarily be designed to: → Provide decision-relevant information at a glance to appropriate stakeholders
20. Which type of analytics recommends optimal actions to achieve desired business outcomes? → Prescriptive analytics
21. What is performance management? → formal, more general comments and updates at predefined times.
22. What is '5S' in the context of workplace and performance improvement? → A workplace organization system: Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain
23. What is a heat map used for in business performance analytics? → Visualizing data density or intensity across geographic or categorical dimensions
24. A data warehouse differs from a transactional database primarily because it is optimized for: → Reporting and analytical queries
25. Which improvement methodology uses DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) as its core framework? → Six Sigma
26. What is a 'vanity metric' in the context of KPIs? → A metric that looks impressive but does not drive actionable business decisions
27. What is a 'sensitivity analysis' in financial performance planning? → Testing how changes in key assumptions affect financial projections and outcomes
28. A company notices declining customer satisfaction scores. Which analytics approach best identifies the root cause? → Diagnostic analytics
29. When setting KPI targets, what is the purpose of establishing a 'baseline'? → To provide a starting reference point for measuring progress and improvement
30. Which of the following duties is a manager performing if he creates a fresh idea and lays out a plan for the creation of a new product at work? → Entrepreneur