Partial or global measures? Perspectives from public leisure facility managers

Partial and global measures are two broad approaches that have been used to present performance data. The aim of this research was to investigate whether global measures provide valuable information which is not readily available from partial measures and whether global measures can be transferred successfully from the academic to the practical domain. Applying action research, this study began with developing, based on data envelopment analysis, a global measure model and applied the model in three public leisure centres in England during 2005–2007. It was found that, for practitioners in the public leisure sector, inclusiveness and simplicity are the most important criteria of a good performance measurement system. That is, not only does performance data need to be inclusive, the analytical process also needs to be simple and understandable. In addition, facility managers' analytical skills and motivations for benchmarking are two factors which determine the practicability of a global measure.