Choosing How to Measure and manage progress

KPI's and metrics can be used to measure progress toward your customer and business aspirations. By continuously monitoring your team can learn what works in terms of enabling progress and what less well or not at all. Remember the ol but true cliche - what gets measured gets done.

"You should always know how you're doing against your metrics. You should always have a weekly review meeting every week.”

Sam Altman, CEO OpenAI

Introduction

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) play a crucial role in business strategy by providing a measurable way to track progress towards achieving specific aspirations and objectives. KPIs allow you and your team to assess performance against established benchmarks and identify areas for improvement. By regularly monitoring and analyzing KPIs, you can make informed decisions about where to focus resources and efforts to optimize performance. KPIs also help align employees achieve common goals, increase accountability, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. Ultimately, incorporating balanced KPIs into business strategy can lead to better decision-making, increased efficiency, and improved outcomes.

StrategyCAD KPI structure
Based upon your customer and business aspirations, record, at least a candidate set of Key Performance Indicators to keep score of how your business is doing and its performance trend.
Getting the right set of KPI's may require some adjustment or additions as you go through the Strategic choices canvas

Adding a KPI to your strategic choices canvas

  1. Within the aspirations section of the Strategic choices canvas - locate the Key Performance Indicators

  2. Click the Add button or if you want to get some proposed Key Performance indicators from the A.I recommendation engine click the AI button. add kpi screen shot

  3. Provide a name for the KPI in the KPI section. Identify the target for the KPI and how frequently, you will measure the KPI. Indicate the type of chart to be used to visualize the KPI and provide your reason or rationale for tracking this KPI.
    add kpi dialog

  4. As you add your KPI's you can setup your performance dashboard at the bottom of the Strategic choices canvas. KPI performance dashboard

Why Business drivers?

KPI's will frequently be trailing indicators. A trailing indicator such as sales in the last quarter or last year or revenue last quarter or net profit margin last quarter tells you what has happened, in the past.

Business drivers are ideally your leading indicators. For example, you may understand a relationship between hosting webinar events, sales leads and total sales. On that basis you may decide to have a business driver of running at least 10 webinars per month or have 100 attendees per month to your webinars. This is an activity over which your business has control and it influences your sales figures over which you have less direct control.

Adding a Business driver to your strategic choices canvas

  1. Within the aspirations section of the Strategic choices canvas - locate the Business drivers

  2. Click the Add button or if you want to get some proposed Business drivers from the A.I recommendation engine click the AI button. add business driver screen shot

  3. Provide a name for the Business driver in the Business driver section. Identify the target for the Business driver and how frequently, you will measure the driver. Indicate the type of chart to be used to visualize the driver and provide your reason or rationale for tracking this business driver.

  4. As you add your business drivers you can associate them with KPI's in your performance dashboard at the bottom of the Strategic choices canvas. KPI performance dashboard
    In the charts on the left, you can see the business driver is associated with the KPI above it. You can add one or more business drivers for any KPI. Additionally, you can associate the same business driver with multiple KPI's to see the correlation between driver and KPI.

References

  1. Scaling Your Business: 11 Key Metrics Every Leader Should Monitor Forbes

  2. 30 Financial Metrics and KPIs to Measure Success in 2023 Oracle Netsuite

  3. The Most Important Metrics You’re Not Tracking (Yet) Harvard Business Review

Choose your Aspirations

Table of contents

Choosing - Where to play