KPIs: Key Performance Indicators A-Z: Performance Management

Identify key performance indicators as numerical measures to assess performance and track them regularly. Learn to choose, create, collate, and present KPIs to gain actionable insights across business areas.

Learn why KPIs drive high performance and informed decisions by quantifying performance with metrics, providing structure, discipline, and insight to improve business outcomes.

KPIs link objectives with measurable metrics to provide control and feedback, showing progress over time. They drive change, enable objective evaluation, and may require careful use for individuals.

Define mission, vision, strategy, and goals to align KPIs with our strategy, vision, and mission, and track progress on strategic and operational goals.

Discover how mission, vision, strategy, and goals shape KPIs, illustrated by two fitness clients and their muscle mass, body fat, blood pressure, and mobility targets.

Understand how to structure KPIs in a hierarchy from top level KPIs to supporting sub KPIs, using medical and business examples to show how top metrics drive profits.

Discover how KPIs drive business performance by translating high-level measures into actionable objectives and metrics, and explore metrics versus KPIs, OKRs, and the three ps progress plans and problems.

Analyze how net profit, return on capital employed (ROCE/ROIC), return on investment, and cash flow drive a business's financial success and investment timing.

Identify top level KPIs for the operations function, focusing on net profits, return on investment, and cash flow, to improve output, costs, inventory, and lead times.

Design and track operations KPIs from outputs, productivity, quality, delivery, inventory, lead time, and inventory turns to align with top financial KPIs and drive customer satisfaction and safety.

Explain the difference between metrics and KPIs, showing that all KPIs are metrics but not all metrics are KPIs; key indicators depend on stakeholder perspective and performance relevance.

Explore how objectives and key results (OKRs) turn strategy into measurable, time-bound goals, while KPIs track progress and complement OKRs with numerical targets such as revenue and customer service metrics.

Use the ppp framework—progress, plans, and problems—to structure performance reviews, track progress over time with KPIs and quantifiable goals, and boost credibility in status reporting.

Explore how to choose and evaluate metrics, avoiding the cobra effect and dysfunctional behaviors, and distinguish subparts from system CPI's with a practical checklist.

Design KPIs that align with the business mission and strategy, prioritizing relevance, clarity, and actionability. Ensure metrics are incorruptible, incentivize desired behaviors, and balance integrated insights via a balanced scorecard.

Identify why metrics are bad by examining pitfalls like data you can't influence or that invites gaming. Use ice cream shop example to emphasize KPIs that drive revenue and service.

Examine the cobra effect and unintended consequences of a cobra bounty, showing how rewards boosted breeding and ultimately undermined the reward program.

Explore how well-intentioned KPIs can trigger dysfunctional behaviors, from cross-selling scandals to workarounds, and learn to design counterbalance metrics that align incentives with ethical performance.

Examine how subparts like the sales team or factory shape the whole system and why optimizing subparts' KPIs in isolation often harms overall performance.

Don't assume you can optimize the system by optimizing the subparts. Focus on the bottleneck and improve the overall flow, guided by KPIs and the Theory of Constraints.

Evaluate existing metrics with a practical checklist, ensuring titles, purpose, relevance, congruency, targets, control limits, formulas, frequency, data sources, and responsibilities align with business objectives.

Discover how KPIs fuel management insight and improvement, while recognizing they are not value added and must be used carefully to avoid waste and flawed people measurements.

Explore leading and lagging KPIs, examine integrated and complementary KPIs, and introduce the balanced scorecard.

Explore balancing leading and lagging indicators to forecast future performance and assess past outcomes. Use metrics like training runs, diet adherence, and safety observations to guide KPI actions.

Balance outputs, quality, and cost by using integrated and complementary KPIs, monitoring inventory availability, and keeping three to six KPIs to prevent hidden trade-offs and show real improvements.

The balanced scorecard presents KPIs across four perspectives—financial, customer, internal business, and innovation and learning—to provide a fast, comprehensive view while balancing leading and lagging indicators.

Implement KPIs by moving them from planning to actual use in the company, overcome objections, boost visibility, and tell a data-driven story to engage your team.

Start from what you can control to build useful KPIs for your team, deliver clear, presentable information to your boss, and gain senior support for performance reviews.

Tackling common objections to KPIs, the lecture shows how clear metrics linked to strategy reveal progress, overcome resistance, and make data visible to drive improvement.

Learn to handle objections to performance visibility by addressing insecurities and hidden agendas, attacking the issue and involving stakeholders to design and report KPIs that reveal real performance.

Improve KPI visibility by making data presentable and accessible, so every employee understands objectives and tracks performance via dashboards, notice boards, or emails.

Learn to tell a story with KPIs by adding context to charts, key events, and quotes, making data emotionally engaging and memorable for stakeholders.

Tell compelling KPI storytelling by defining the business objective, identifying the audience, delivering a clear, repeatable message, and linking data to a memorable narrative.

Explore how to present data effectively by applying the golden rules of presenting data, evaluating charts, and using infographics and dashboards to illuminate KPIs.

Use charts and graphs to convey data quickly for humans to understand, highlighting trends over time; explore the main types of charts.

Learn to visualize key performance indicators using line, bar, hybrid bar-line, and scatter charts to reveal trends, compare series, and read precise values.

Explains waterfall charts by tracing how a starting budget of 750000 changes with volume, price, and costs to reveal variances vs plan and actual, then assesses pie charts for breakdowns.

Explore histograms to reveal review score distributions and go beyond averages in KPI dashboards. See how tables with conditional formatting and gauges convey quick KPI status.

Present data clearly by tailoring charts to your audience, choosing appropriate chart types, and applying essential controls: title, axis labels, units, scale, color, textures, and data density.

Critically evaluate charts and graphs for KPI dashboards, focusing on clear legends, labeled axes, readable colors, and accurate data presentation to reveal true performance trends.

Explore how infographics use images, charts, and text to give a simple overview of data, balancing visual appeal with clarity for different audiences.

Evaluate how different infographics convey headline data, readability, color and credibility, noting effective designs that clearly spell out key messages and pitfalls like unclear legends or dubious data.

Explore how KPI dashboards consolidate crucial performance indicators on a single page, compare Excel basics to specialized software, and highlight data preparation, visualization, and sharing considerations for performance management.

Evaluate KPI dashboards in Excel Online, featuring varied graphics, filters and slicers, clear titles, and trend-focused visuals to support data-driven business decisions.

Link KPIs to the organization's mission and top-level metrics, evaluate good versus bad metrics, and use dashboards and balanced scorecards to drive performance.

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