Classification and Definition

KPIs can be used to measure the progress of a business toward its goals through process efficiency, performance, and productivity. The combination of different common KPIs can show how your managers are doing with respect to business goals, how effective the business model is, and how reliable your managers are in making the company’s business sustainable.

Category

Efficiency, productivity, reliability

Definition

Among all available indicators, there are three essential KPIs that can be implemented to draw a comprehensive and unbiased picture of the performances and capabilities of your company’s executives and managers. They all pertain to administration and project management and are as follows:

• Earned Value (EV)
  A measure of the extent projects are making the desired progress through a recap of the amount of work done and its costs, with respect to project expectations. It is calculated as the percentage of progress multiplied by the total budgeted cost for labor and resources for the project (BCWP).
• Project Schedule Variance
  A measure of the extent to which projects are delivered on schedule. It is similar to DIFOT, except that it expresses any deviations in early and late ends, as resulting from the difference between actual completion time and scheduled completion time.
• Performance Level
  A measure of the management proficiency calculated as the ratio between the actual cost of work scheduled or the total amount in labor and resources that has been spent on the project to date, in percentage.

Rationale

KPIs are essential to measure the efficiency and productivity of a business and to assess the reliability of its processes and management.

There is no dashboard immediately available in the Wordbee analytics for such indicators as those above. However, these can be derived from the many reports that Wordbee users may find in the Financial tab from the Reports item of the My company menu, especially from the Project profit and loss report and the Client and supplier costs – Details.

Impact

Based on the data collected through the Reports available, as well as any customized ones, standard KPIs of choice may be revised for more insights to take further actions.

These KPIs are ‘first-glance’ gauges to have the pulse of the company.

For a more accurate outlook, refer to the other indicators described elsewhere in this blog.

Remember, however, that too many KPIs might be distracting and confusing and their assessment frustrating. Select only the ones that are most important to you by keeping in mind the ‘iron triangle’ (cost, time, quality).

Spreadsheets applications like Microsoft Excel are the primary and still the most effective tool to build customized KPI dashboards.

Usage Advice

This set of basic KPIs is a good starting point to setup your KPI process. To identify actionable KPI targets:

1. Review your business objectives.
2. Review your strategic plan.
3. Pick the KPIs that relate to your strategy.
4. Determine a time-scale target for each KPI.
5. Work backwards from your time-scale targets.
6. Adjust your KPI selection.

You can build your own KPI dashboard to include specific indicators.

You might also want to use Wordbee to customize reports to gain different perspectives on data. Most reports can, in fact, be customized in a few steps.

Refer to Wordbee’s documentation platform for a list of available business analytics reports and for detailed instruction on how to generate customized reports.