Practical help with KPIs, measures and reporting
How many “top level” KPIs do you have? If you have more than 10 top-level measures then you probably have too many. Building a measurement hierarchy can help show which ones are crucial. Remember to focus on the indicators that support your strategy.
Review your reporting, can you tell at a glance how your business is performing? Can you (and the rest of your team) easily tell how your organisation is doing, even after coming back from holiday? If you can’t, consider designing a report template and making things visual, with more charts and performance icons. Here is [...]
Define you measures. Make sure each measure is clearly described, has an owner, has a documented way of calculating it, the source of the information, what it’s intended to do, how it should be reported and what action should be taken based on what it’s saying. Here’s a checklist to help you do this.
Using brain science to design better reports and dashboards The challenge with dashboards is that we are trying to convey an insanely large amount of information in a very small space. A dashboard I built for a client a couple of years ago had nearly 2,000 pieces of information on an A3 sheet. To be [...]
Ditch measures that are not useful. Often measures are retained as they are “interesting”. If the measures are not useful, and used, consider ditching them.
Measure things that are not in control. Organisations tend to shy away from this, as the message initially looks grim. If you are trying to improve things then it’s essential to measure the things that are not working properly.
Here’s a handy Excel tip that took me years to discover. Making chart objects the same dimensions and getting them to line up precisely can be a real pain in Excel. If you a creating a dashboard with lots of chart objects this can become really time-consuming. The solution is to use the cell grid [...]
I have witnessed more debates about KPIs and measures than any human really should. They normally settle into a few clear families. We shouldn’t measure -insert controversial topic- because: It’s too hard/expensive to measure We tried that before and it didn’t work It doesn’t have a causal link with the thing that we are interested [...]
I learned something new yesterday. I heard about the “Cobra Effect”. When Britain ruled India there was a problem identified with the number of [venomous] cobra snakes in the country. The government decided to offer a reward for every dead cobra brought to the authorities. Initially it had the desired effect, reducing the number of [...]
5 steps to write better report commentary – How to write a style guide
Do you find your reports read like they were written by people competing to make different points? Do similar sections vary wildly in length, depending on who wrote them? Do the readers come back with basic questions that should have been covered in the commentary? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes” [...]
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