Joined-up KPIs to drive High Performance
“KPIs and measures can drive a business in the right direction, or become instruments of torture.”
“We have all this data, but it’s not helping us get a handle on how to achieve consistently high performance.”
This was the situation facing one of my clients. Their KPIs were definitely more of a torture than a driver of performance.
The situation
An increasingly competitive market climate meant that anything less than near–perfect delivery and quality performance was damaging customer relationships and losing business. The MD and the board were demanding explanations for under–performance and action to fix it and were expecting to find them in the Operations team’s KPIs, and they weren’t getting the answers they needed!
The Problem
Despite collecting lots of data and presenting a comprehensive pack of graphs and tables every month, there was no clarity on where things were going wrong. Managing performance was still reacting to the vast array of day–to–day problems that occurred. Each individual instance could be explained, but there was no sense of pattern of how things inter–related and where the real cause of the difficulties lay. Daily life for everyone was chaotic, leading to confusion and frustration all round and minimal consistent improvement in performance.
The Solution
Once I introduced them to my simple structure for aligning their organisation structure, process, KPIs and accountability for action it was like a light had been switched on. Some teams realised that their KPIs were actually measuring another team’s performance, and so were totally out of their control!
Now every team has measures that focus on their contribution to the overall operational performance goals. All the measures join up to deliver overall customer performance and allow any underperformance to be traced back to source so the right action can be taken. Everyone is clear and motivated to take action and delivery performance to customers is steadily increasing.
The Workbook
I’ve now captured this approach in my ‘Joined–up KPIs to drive High Performance’ workbook – an easy–to–follow guide to the process of aligning your organisation structure, process, KPIs and accountability for action.
Setting up your KPIs using this structure will:
enable every team to see clearly how they are doing and how that contributes towards the overall performance goals for customer delivery
allow you to trace back to the ‘point of cause’ to know where to take action if performance is less than required
Topics covered
Steps to clear performance management
Your Operating Model
Aligning you Organisation Model
Process Flow
KPIs mapped to responsibilities
Accountability traceback
Putting it all together for each area