Key Performance Indicators and Performance Management are Crucial to Business Agility!
When a business takes on the task of going from an opinion-based, guessing game environment to a metrics-based, fact-based environment, it must decide WHAT to measure. Metrics are fine, but deciding what is important to measure is crucial. You can measure the wrong things and end up knowing nothing about what is happening in your enterprise, and which tasks and activities are contributing to your bottom line, as opposed to the tasks that are non-productive and business processes that should be modified.
‘Include key performance indicators and performance management in your strategy to understand why your results are improving or declining…stop working the dark.’
The University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) focuses organizational metrics in five areas of the enterprise:
- Customer Satisfaction
- Work Environment
- Business Processes
- Learning and Innovation
- Financial
This approach can provide an example of a roadmap, but every organization is different and establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect your business focus, industry, function and market will be an exercise that is unique to your organization.
One thing is very clear, metrics are critical to performance management and businesses that wish to establish a fact-based, measurable environment must provide access to tools and software that will allow management, IT, analysts and business users to create, monitor and manage KPIs and metrics using collaborative tools that make it easy to integrate data form disparate sources and use that data to analyze and measure for decision-making, problem solving and course correction.
KPI tools will provide critical metrics by which you can measure success and avoid subjective results and opinion-driven decisions.
Features and Functionality should include:
- Simple, easy-to-use business intelligence and BI tools with multidimensional KPI capability
- Browser-based access to encourage user adoption and enhance productivity and collaboration
- Flexible tools with interactive options to change frequencies, dimension breakdowns and allow users to drill down to analyze trends, etc.
- Ability to monitor at individual, team, department, division and company level
- Expression engine to set polarity, frequency and threshold levels
Every business is under pressure to capitalize on the business knowledge and professional skills of its team members and to give them the analytics and tools they need to make recommendations and suggestions and to solve problems and, most importantly, to find and leverage opportunities to improve business results. Whether you are beholden to a board of directors, shareholders or to an executive team looking to cut costs and stay on target, it is crucial to include key performance indicators and performance management in your strategy. If you don’t understand why your results are improving or declining, you will be working the dark.
‘Every organization is different and establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect your business focus, industry, function and market will be an exercise that is unique to your organization.’
Find out how Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), performance management, Self-Serve Business Intelligence Tools and Augmented Analytics tools can improve your business results. Let us help you achieve your vision and improve productivity and insight across the organization.
Original Post : KPIs and Performance Management Drive Results!
