In the first article of this series I defined the basic terms and philosophy of KPIs. In the second I related some of my experiences with KPIs. The third discussed financial rewards. Here let's talk about
Cautionary Notes
The introduction of KPIs in your organisation is not an easy, simple panacea that will solve all your organisational ills. It is not easy to figure out an encompassing statistic for every position in an organisation. It is even more difficult for the creative jobs. For instance in a software development company, such as mine, there are standard metrics for programmers, like number of lines of code, function points or features. Each has its liabilities. Measuring only lines of code can lead to voluminous, inefficient code. The code could easily be one tenth as long and ten times easier to maintain had the developer spent the same amount of time figuring a more concise way to accomplish it.
I recall several heated discussions I had with a team who were repetitively churning out screen forms that required a day and a half to create the code to save and retrieve the data from the database. Only one developer saw the desirability of creating a data plumbing framework that reduced the time to ten minutes for simple screen forms created after that.
It took quite some time to create that framework and even more to add to it as additional requirements were discovered. Computing her productivity on number of lines of code or features delivered would have made her production look abysmal yet it was a brilliant solution with fantastic long-term benefits. The framework set us up to be able to deliver far more functionality for far less cost than would otherwise have been the case.
---------------------------------
Two quotes from Peter Drucker.
"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."
"Management by objectives works if you think through your objectives. Ninety percent of the time you haven't."
Staticising the wrong things will cause problems. Don't rush into an implementation of business performance measurement without considering the focus that your staff will have as a result of the definitions of your KPIs.
If you have a large, well running organisation, consider a staggered implementation so you can closely monitor each area as KPIs are introduced. Have someone keen on the success of the program look for and handle any negativity in the staff affected.
Be especially alert to check for actions being dropped because "they don't contribute to the stats". It may be that the staff member does not see the relationship. It may be that the definition of the KPI does not explicitly state or even imply a relationship. In this case the definition may need to be reworded.
---------------------------------
There are potential down sides to the introduction of staff KPIs in an organisation. You may get some protest at this from the people who would not want their lack of production to be exposed. I will leave you to wonder how much better off your whole team would be without the non-producers keeping their foot on the brake of organisational productivity!
Page 1 of 2 :: First | Last ::  Prev | 1 2 | Next 
|
