Key Performance Indicators

Key Performance Indicators –  What they are and why they matter

 

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. Perhaps you know it by another term.

KPI’s are developed by organisational leaders and managers and are used to drive, measure and manage performance. This means they should provide a clear way to communicate how well an organisation or an individual is doing, against agreed aims or goals. Even more importantly, KPI’s should guide and support efforts to achieve desired results.

Whilst KPI’s tend to be metric based nowadays, when they were first introduced, they were about predicting success and as such, the actual metrics were just one part of the story.

 

“Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count;

everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.”

Albert Einstein

In terms of how KPI’s are used, there will often be organisational KPI’s as well as individual ones. Naturally, any individual KPI should dovetail and feed into the higher level organisational KPI’s.

When applied in the right ways, KPI’s should be an effective way to drive the healthiest and most effective thinking and behaviours to allow organisations to effectively predict and improve performance. Sadly, the truth in many cases is quite different and KPI’s are often doing the very opposite of this. In addition, the most fundamental Key Performance Indicator rarely, if ever, gets effectively factored into the performance formula. This is what my work is all about. I will be exploring this via the newsletter and blog over the coming months, so do sign up and make sure you get all the latest updates.

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