KPI

On a weekly Scorecard a KPI is one row: the measure, the owner, the goal, and thirteen weeks of history running left to right. Five to fifteen rows is the working range for a leadership team. A number nobody can pull in five minutes on a Monday morning gets a cheaper substitute or moves to the monthly review.

Calling a number a KPI is a commitment rather than a description. Most companies already produce hundreds of measurements and act on four of them, so the useful work is subtraction: deciding which handful the team will be held to. Skip that step and you get a board nobody reads and a meeting that runs on anecdote anyway.

Worked example: A twenty-person commercial cleaning firm listed thirty-one numbers its software could produce, then cut to seven: sites visited, jobs finished on schedule, callbacks, new contracts signed, hours billed against hours paid, cash collected, and staff absence. Each got a name and a goal. The other twenty-four still sit in reports, and nobody has asked for one of them in a year.

Sources: kpi.org/kpi-basics; klipfolio.com/resources/kpi-examples