Glossary
Variance
Variance is the gap between the target and the actual, written as a number or a percentage: goal twelve, actual nine, variance minus three. It is what a weekly review is really discussing, and saying it plainly keeps the conversation off how the week felt. One week of variance is noise. Three in the same direction is a pattern and belongs on the issues list.
01
Reading variance without overreacting to one bad week
The weekly answer is on track or off track, and the variance is the size of the miss. A single red row gets a sentence rather than a debate. A row that is red three weeks running is where the meeting spends its hour, because that is the point at which the cause is structural instead of a customer who happened to be away.
Teams tend to treat every miss as equally serious, which burns the time they have for solving anything. Variance read against history sorts it out: small and alternating is a number behaving normally. Large and one-sided means either the process changed or the target was wrong, and those are two different conversations with two different owners.
Worked example: A print shop missed its on-time target by two jobs in week one, four in week two and one in week three, always on the same press. Each miss was small enough to wave through. Plotted against thirteen weeks, they clustered around one operator's shift pattern, and the fix turned out to be a handover checklist rather than a new machine.
Sources: kpi.org/kpi-basics/dashboarding-and-analysis; Traction, Gino Wickman, chapter on Data
Target
A target is the number written beside a measure that says what a good week looks like: twelve proposals, ninety-five percent on time, cash collected.
02Trailing 13-week view
A trailing thirteen-week view keeps a quarter of history beside the current number, so one bad week reads as noise and a repeated miss reads as a pattern.
03Goal band
A goal band replaces a single target with a range: green above one number, red below another, and a middle zone that means watch this.
04KPIs and EOS®: build a Scorecard that predicts results
Where KPIs fit inside EOS: the weekly Scorecard, 5 to 15 measurables, one owner each, and a simple picker to draft yours by industry in a few minutes.
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