Conversations from the Mirror42 Team

How does one come to a set of KPIs for their own specific company?

Setting KPIs is not easy and it is not always wise to simply copy what others have done and rely on best-practices.

In general, KPIs are related to the corporate strategy of a company. What is the goal of the company for this year? Is it to break-even, to grow marketshare?, to deliver new products to the market, to be the most customer friendly company in the market?

A company can be broken down in core processes and supporting processes. The core processes make the difference with the competition, it is what makes your company unique. The supporting processes are often not unique. This differs per industry. In the finance and telco industry, the IT processes are core processes and allow them to compete, think about better financial analysis applications or faster networks, however in most industries IT is not a core process and simply supporting.

For your supporting processes (HR, Finance, IT) it is often ok to standardize on best-practices. However for your core processes you should perhaps start with best-practices but think about your KPIs as an extension of your corporate strategy. What are your goals? How are you going to measure and quantify those goals. And if your goal is to make a big profit, then do not make the mistake to call profit an indicator. financial outcomes are not often indicators, but results. The indicators are “more sales meetings, bigger quotations, more leads, more partnerships, more projects. These indicators lead eventually to more profit. A KPI is a Key Performance Indicators, not a Key Performance Outcome.

You can use KPI Library to find best practices for your processes and perhaps your industry. Use this as a starting point, a source of inspiration to start your internal discussion with some examples. Dont expect the KPI Library to be your destination, but the start of your journey.

Last week we have introduced the ability to browse KPIs by business framework. A business framework is a standardized set of processes for a certain business area. Examples of such frameworks are:

• ITIL (Information Technology)
• SCOR (Supply Chain)
• Cobit (Information Technology)
• Prince2 (Project Portfolio)
• Value Reference Model (Value Chain)

Take a look at the new search and select options: http://kpilibrary.com/library

Also, the ability to select KPIs from these frameworks is available in our premium products: KPI Dashboard, KPI Benchmark and KPI Project.

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Last week we released some new features on KPI Library.

• News Keep up-to-date with the latest news in the world of performance management.

• Expert themes Browse posts from our experts on topics such as Balanced Scorecard, KPIs, and Staff & Organization

We invite you to check it out.