Target

Every Scorecard row carries one target, and the weekly answer is on track or off track rather than a paragraph. Set the first version from your own trailing thirteen weeks instead of an industry figure, because the job of the first quarter is to find out what normal looks like here. Adjust at the quarterly, not after a bad Monday.

A target set too high stops carrying information. When a row is red every week, the team learns to read past it, and the meeting loses a row without anybody deciding to drop one. A target set where the team already sits teaches nothing either. The common failure is picking a number to motivate rather than to describe, then quietly moving it at quarter end so the board reads green.

Worked example: A specialty bakery set a target of forty wholesale accounts contacted a week because the owner liked the sound of it. The team hit nineteen, twenty-two and eighteen, then stopped reporting the row at all. Rebuilt from the previous quarter, the honest number was twenty. The target went to twenty-four, was met in four of the next six weeks, and later moved to twenty-eight.

Sources: kpi.org/kpi-basics/kpi-development; Traction, Gino Wickman, chapter on Data