Where to find example KPIs and measures...

Warning, Warning, Warning!

If you think you're going to find meaningful performance measures by trawling around on the internet, think again!

Sure, you can get some good ideas, but there are some risks you have to acknowledge first:

• rarely are sample measures described in enough detail for you to understand exactly how to compute them
• you simply must be clear about your results before you look for potential measures - otherwise you just end up measuring what's easy (and rarely is that what's useful)
• adopting other people's measures is the same as adopting their strategy (and it may not be right for your organisation)
• adopting some measures and telling staff that's what's going to be used will not get you any buy-in

Now, I'll step off my soapbox, assuming that you've heeded the warning, and give you a few resources for finding potential measures for your organisation:

ARTICLE: 3 risks of off-the-shelf measures

Do you go looking for measures that your organisation or team can adopt? Do you trawl through the annual reports of organisations in your industry? Do you survey your colleagues at industry conferences, do you search for KPIs in your industry on the internet? Do you ask the so-called experts what measures you should be using? Are these your only strategies for finding the most meaningful measures for your goals? Yes? Oops! You're probably about to take a tumble into one of the 3 traps!

RESOURCE: How to Design Meaningful Performance Measures (digital how-to kit)

This how-to kit is about measure design. It's an excellent companion to use to help you sift through all the measure examples you find in your research, to help you pick those that have the most meaning and most relevance to your goals. Read more or buy this tool.

RESOURCE: Getting Started With Performance Measures (digital how-to kit)

Practice the development of meaningful performance measures yourself. This digital kit (which you can download as soon as you've purchased it) will step you through the process of designing and implementing just a few performance measures for one of your goals. A great way to pilot test a fresh and common sense approach to measuring. Read more about Getting Started With Performance Measures now.

WEBSITE: The KPI Library

KPI Library is a good source of triggers or ideas for measures in all kinds of categories, but as with all off-the-shelf measures and KPIs, there is not enough detail to rely solely on this as a source of measures for your business or organisation.

ARTICLE: 5 basic performance measures

If you are at a loss for what to start measuring, then try these 5 basic performance measures. Spend as little time as possible tailoring them to your business; spend more time pilot testing them. You'll learn tonnes more about the best measures for your business through getting started with something, rather than waiting until you've designed the best way to measure.

ARTICLE: A simple way to measure customer satisfaction

Most people in business know they need feedback from customers in order to make service delivery and product design more in line with customer needs and expectations. But too often, the process of measuring customer satisfaction and perception is more complex and convoluted than it needs to be. Here is a simple approach that gives you punchy customer feedback, without overloading the customer with a thousand and one questions.

ARTICLE: There's no such thing as the performance measure stork!

In my early years as a performance measurement practitioner, before Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard was published and only just as organisations were waking up to the realisation they needed more performance information than the profit and loss statement, the most common way to choose performance measures was to hire the big consultancies to research and write a “this is what you need to measure” report. Even after sifting through the hundreds of performance measure ideas to select the most critical to the business, very few of these measures ever made it into performance reports (let alone performance discussions).

ARTICLE: Should you measure individual people's performance?

Performance Appraisal, Individual Performance Review, Personal Performance Development Plan. There are numerous names for this artifact of the post-1990’s organisation, but they are names for basically the same concept: the measurement, review, evaluation and management of the performance of an employee. And it is one of the most contentious management processes of them all! Read some thoughts about two schools of thought about measuring people.

BOOK: 2600 Phrases for Effective Performance Reviews: ready to use words and phrases that really get results

For a wide array of jobs, author Paul Falcone provides lists of example statements to use to describe actual performance at the levels of 'Meets/Exceeds Expectations' and 'Needs Improvement'. This book also provides statements that can assist in formulating specific goals and perhaps even performance measures or KPIs for performance appraisal. Not a bad starting point, and many of the examples provided are very specific, actionable and measurable. Read my amazon.com review or buy this book.

Want more?

If you'd like more information about designing meaningful measures, contact me.

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