Selecting the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for a project is critical as you will need these KPIs to accurately gauge the project’s success and performance over time. There is no universal remedy for choosing the correct KPIs, but there quite a few things that you will always need to consider. KPIs are essential to see if your project is meeting the set goals.
Relate them directly to your business objectives
What is the goal of your project? For example, consider you want to improve your social media engagement. In this case, KPIs would be the number of active users, number of followers you gain on a daily basis, and the number of people who engage with your posts.
Set daily, weekly, and monthly metrics, and try to choose controllable KPIs. The KPIs chosen should be directly related to the core project goal in order to achieve accurate measurement. Train your employees to think this way in order to choose the best possible KPIs.
Less is more
Don’t attempt to measure everything about a particular project or product as you are liable to end up too many trivial factors. Have clear, specific KPIs that focus on the key aspects of your project. In order to do this, you will need to have clear business goals instead of a general idea of what you want. The number of key metrics you choose will directly be influenced by the number of business goals you have.
Use qualitative and quantitative KPIs
Understandably, most business and product related KPIs will be quantitative in nature as this provides businesses with hard statistics and facts. For qualitative KPIs, you measure metrics such as how engaged employees are with goals and what they think of the direction of the project. Employees are statistically likely to perform better if they have more information about the project. If you are a product-centric business, customer feedback is the best type of qualitative KPI. Using both types of measurement will provide you with a fuller idea of how your project is doing.
Consider lagging and leading indicators
It is always good to compare past outcomes with present or future outcomes in order to see how your project is doing. Lagging indicators are basically outputs of things that have already taken place while leading indicators are inputs that attempt to predict the likelihood of achieving your business goals. Identifying key leading indicators could allow you alter your expectations of how a project will perform and feasibly even generate excellent results. Don’t make the mistake of only focusing on lagging indicators.
Look at trends
Understand the kind of trends that are taking place or could take place in the future in the field of your project in order to stay ahead of the curve. Analyzing customer and business trends will allow you to plan for the future as well. The identification of leading indicators and trends typically go hand-in-hand and could make or break the success of a project.
