KPI’s are a fundamental part of any Power BI landscape as Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) show your performance in Critical Success Factors (CSF’s). When reality meets the road, you find that all your tools will offer “KPI’s”, but often using these does not add value to the business. In this video series, we have gone through the thought process about how to set up your Power BI KPI’s to best support the CSFs of your organisation. KPI’s can be anything; one thought that keeps coming around when this is discussed is “Frequency of Lunchtime Meal Deliveries”… This leftfield measure seems out there, but if teams order a lunch delivery to celebrate a big sale or similar event, then more of those taking place shows the business is performing well… or does it? The challenge would again be tooling? Do you have a food ordering system that could track that, or is it entirely manual?
So KPI’s are simple, aren’t they? A top-level at-a-glance view of performance, they are nothing more. This next thing is always to keep it simple and avoid showing values with KPI’s instead show status. This is a tough one for many businesses and their leaders as this are often seen a “limiting” their view of what is going on. The problem is that numbers drive bad behaviours.
Let us assume we’re using “Lunch Orders”, If our teams order less than 5 food deliveries a week, that’s Red, 5-9 is warning – Yellow, and 10+ is green, so if my Management sees the number and on Thursday, we have 8 Orders. I can guarantee that two orders will be made on Friday regardless of what happens within the business. So GREAT we are Green our Management “Knows” how great we’re doing. The problem is, are we honest? The reality of KPI’s is they will drive behaviours, get them wrong, and the behaviours that are being driven can be detrimental to your business. If you want to use Lunch Orders, I would advise making it secret and not publicising it; instead, bury it and present the RAG status.
Remember that your KPI’s must be considered in terms of People, Process and Tooling. Success comes when the three work together and are considered together. Going back to the top, we talked about using metrics supplied by your tooling; this happens regularly in many industries and organisations. However, considering the people and processes within the organisation, this is where the challenges start. If the People and Processes don’t benefit from that metric, you risk long term process success. One metric I see used the most is “Speed to Answer” for telephone metrics; this is a standard Metric for a third-party Call Centre, i.e. If Geordie Intelligence offered Telephone Support and we wanted to cut costs, so a Third-party company approaches us to offer that service with a KPI around speed to answer calls and that works… Internally, though that does not work, the only option should not be meeting your target does not benefit the process. We talked about this in terms of a Sales line… If it is taking too long to answer the Sales Line, what options do we have
- Shorten Call handling time – Encourage sales team to process calls more quickly – consistently shown to damage staff moral and impact customer satisfaction
- Hire more staff – Increase in business costs would lead to an increase in product price
So does that “Speed to Answer” make sense internally? Remember that our partner company Geordie Consulting is all about the whole Power Platform, so they convince us to install a Power Virtual Agent. Suddenly you can manage sales and queries via a chat interface, so we are more able to sell, the interface can handle other languages (apparently there are more out there than Geordie), so we sell more and are doing better, but because our call volumes have dropped so much we do not staff the line as much, so our Speed to Answer increases…
I hope you can see from the example above that People, Process and Tooling must align.