If your organization is like most organizations who use Performance Analytics, you probably started with a few specific KPIs but have quickly seen that expand to hundreds. This proliferation of KPIs isn't necessarily bad, but it does present a challenge as you try to prioritize your time and determine KPIs to surface up to senior management. This post is intended to give you a tool to consistently help you assess the potential value and efficacy of KPIs.
My wife is a teacher, and she's introduced me to the concept of a "rubric". A "rubric" is a clearly defined set of criteria and degrees of achievement which are intended to provide a consistent foundation to evaluate student work. Basically the idea is that instead of arbitrary grading, any teacher can take the rubric, look at say a term paper, and will come up with the same grade.
I've taken that concept and created a sort of rubric to evaluate the KPIs which you can use in your organization. This is based in part upon guidance published by the Government Accounting Standards Board. The attached document contains a table broken up into 6 primary criteria:
Relevant
Understandable
Timely
Comparable
Reliable
Cost Effective / Feasible
Each of those is then broken up into 4 example scores, such as
The idea is that each KPI is scored across the different criteria, which creates a total score which can be used to assess the appropriateness of the KPI with 6 being the lowest score and 24 being the highest.
Have a look at the rubric, do a quick assessment of some of your KPIs and let me know how it goes. This is by no means perfect, so I'd love to hear people's thoughts and suggestions on improving it. Better yet, grab a few colleagues and assess the KPIs together - one of the biggest benefits of this rubric to date is that it has formed a scaffolding for team discussions which have revealed some very contrary views of the value behind common KPIs.
Regards,
Chris Steinke
Senior Advisory Solution Architect
Platform Intelligence
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