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Paul is a Senior Executive in a large private sector company that has some KPIs but they’re not great KPIs. If you’re anything like Paul, you’re searching for quick ways to ramp up the value of and engagement in performance measurement in your organisation.

Go for the KPI Quick Win.

One of the best ways to start changing people’s ideas about the value of performance measurement is to give them examples or experiences of exactly how it has transformed performance. And the KPI Quick Win is how to do that.

Essential steps in getting your KPI Quick Win.

If you go about setting up a KPI using the same old approach you’ve used for all your existing KPIs (the ones that no-one uses or sees value in), then you’ll just create more of the same. You need to take a fresh approach, an approach that avoids the mistakes our old approaches are based on:

Step 1: Choose a goal you really want or need to achieve

Step 2: Make your goal measurable by teasing out the performance result(s) it implies

Step 3: Use sensory rich language to describe your result

Step 4: Choose potential measures that give evidence of your result

Step 5: Evaluate your potential measures and select the most meaningful one

Step 6: Name and describe your selected measure

Step 7: Define exactly how to calculate your measure’s values

Step 8: Get the data and make it ready for analysis

Step 9: Calculate your measure’s values

Step 10: Choose the presentation method that best highlights your measure’s message

Step 11: Interpret what your measure is saying, and understand why it’s saying that

Step 12: Make a decision, and take action to move closer to your goal

Bonus step: Shout it from the rooftops – share your KPI Quick Win with anyone who’ll listen

After you get your KPI Quick Win.

Don’t rush to overhaul your organisation’s entire performance measure system just on the success from a single quick win. Many people will need more convincing, they’ll need to see how it might work in their functional area, and they’ll need to learn and understand the techniques of good performance measurement to build their confidence and conviction.

So right after your first KPI Quick Win, see if you can get enough people interested to participate in another Quick Win, and run two or three of them in parallel. Let the confidence and conviction grow organically, and when you have a critical mass, you’re ready to develop a comprehensive organisation-wide performance measurement system. That’s what a methodology like PuMP will help you do.

TAKE ACTION: The best action I can suggest to get your KPI Quick Win is to get started today. In a week or two, you’ll have your quick win.