How Best to Identify KPIs

Tons of information out there on this topic…Everything from Hoshin Planning to Balance Scorecard…One approach (depending on organizational level) would be to start with the financials if possible (assuming your firm is a for-profit)and spend some time building and understanding the business model relative to the industry. With this information you can more readily determine if you should be working on top-line (ie sales growth, pricing strength, etc) or bottom-line efforts (ie operational effectiveness)issues. Essentially, do you need to focus on what you do (value prop) or how you do it (productivity)? Good luck.

Good luck.

Just a thought but before you jump to the KPI’s you might want to take a look at which are Key processes.

Sigma has it’s place as a metric but this isn’t one where I like to use it that much. It isn’t really that well understood and it isn’t very sensitive. Personally I think dpu is generally the best understood and it moves relatively easy when you implement changes. People like to see results particularly results they understand.

Just my opinion.

SIPOC is the best way to identify metrics and another way is IPO Metrics… which is Input process output metrics.

@patrickgoodrich – you need to go back to the basic definition of the term: Key Process Indicator. This should be a small set of variables that shows how the process is performing. Rarely is it a single item, as nearly every process has more than one objective. If you can write a mathematical function that describes the inputs to the process and how they get transformed to the outputs, then the outputs are the KPI’s and the inputs are the critical control factors.