How do you measure the success of your organization? It’s not enough to establish a strategy and wait to reach your final destination. What about all the milestones along the way?
Is your team achieving its goals? Are business operations efficient and effective to maximize your results? By setting and measuring key performance indicators, teams will struggle to transform any strategy into success.
What are KPIs? Key performance indicators are quantifiable metrics used to evaluate the efficiencies and success of an employee, group or organization, typically measuring objectives for performance. For example, a sales team might track KPIs measuring how many appointments were held and how many leads converted into contracts. To track the progress and successes of individuals and teams, managers will develop KPI scorecards.
What are KPI scorecards?
A KPI scorecard presents business data in a readable way. It’s a statistical record that measures an employee’s, team’s or company’s progress toward defined performance metrics. By combining KPIs, a manager can better evaluate an employee’s or team’s overall performance.
An effective KPI scorecard not only includes hard data such as total leads and total sales, but it also often features graphs and charts that help teams visualize their results. By establishing a KPI scorecard, organizations can enhance their strategic planning, improve management decisions and increase transparency.
Why are KPI scorecards important for teams?
KPI scorecards are important for teams for a variety of reasons. By determining and measuring the KPIs that are most important to a team’s performance, managers can examine the factors and expectations that will determine a project’s success. By establishing an effective KPI scorecard, teams are able to:
- Determine what characteristics are desirable among individual team members and set performance targets
- Define business goals and design business strategy
- Visualize a successful team and understand the role individuals and departments play in achieving that success
- Identify ways both individuals and teams can positively and negatively impact a task or project
How to create a KPI scorecard
Once an organization defines its KPIs and starts measuring them, a KPI scorecard is used to track and present the results in a meaningful way. Teams can use basic productivity software like Google Sheets and Excel to create their KPI scorecards or choose from a variety of other software tools and resources. First, however, teams must make the following considerations:
- How many KPIs?
Most effective scorecards feature between 30 and 35 KPIs, but it’s important for every organization to find its own best combination to track and achieve its strategic objectives. A KPI scorecard should include enough metrics to track the progress toward each strategic goal, but not so many that managers and teams are overwhelmed with data.
- Most important metrics?
Businesses can measure all sorts of tasks and processes down to the minutest of details. While most performance indicators serve some purpose, not all are needed to include in a KPI scorecard. What are the key performance indicators that have the greatest impact on the organization’s goals?
- How do KPIs relate?
When choosing metrics to include in a scorecard, it’s important to select relational KPIs. How do measures compare with and impact one another? For example, sales teams might focus on how the total number of leads impacts overall conversion rates. Both metrics are necessary to draw a logical conclusion and understand the bigger picture.
- Leading or lagging?
To understand a progression, teams need to focus on both leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators reflect what might happen based on current data, while a lagging indicator reports the results of what has happened in the past.
What is a KPI dashboard?
A KPI dashboard combines the various metrics reported on the KPI report and displays them using interactive graphs and charts. By reviewing KPI dashboard examples, managers and teams gain can quickly review and analyze the KPIs, and the organization of metrics provides a snapshot overview of teams’ progress and success.
Because raw data alone can fail to provide meaningful insights, the KPI dashboard helps organizations visualize the various metrics and understand how they relate to the overall business strategy. Managers can build a KPI dashboard using the same tool or platform teams use to define and track their KPIs, or the data can be exported into a separate reporting or presentation tool like Beautiful.ai.
How to present KPI reports
Presenting a KPI report isn’t exactly on the top of most professionals’ lists of favorite tasks – far from it. Compiling a KPI report is a tedious and time-consuming effort, particularly considering audiences will likely be bored by the results no matter how much work goes into presenting them.
Still, KPI presentation is a vital part of the process. What good is all that data if nobody knows what it means? One way to present a KPI report is through a visually-engaging slide deck.
Organizations can brilliantly present their KPI reports using Beautiful.ai’s Teams Plan with ease thanks to engaging infographics available as Smart Slide templates. Popular data visualization choices like bar graphs, pie charts and line charts are perfect for illustrating KPIs, and designing the infographics couldn’t be easier. Just enter the data and watch as artificial intelligence transforms it into colorful, engaging and perfectly proportioned infographics. Other available Smart Slides like organizational charts and waterfall charts help add meaning to the presentation and serve as excellent KPI dashboard templates.
Even non-designers can contribute to KPI reports thanks to Beautiful.ai’s Teams Plan. Branded Shared Slides and Shared Themes templates mean every team member can add content to slides while they retain a unified and cohesive design and style. Plus, since everyone on the team accesses the same presentations from the cloud, teams never have to worry about keeping track of what version someone last updated. Slides can be updated instantly, so as soon as they receive new data, they can update old reports with a single click.
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