KPIs and the importance of measuring the right things

Grant Leboff: So, Brian, in the book, you talk about the importance of measures and metrics. For an organization that's quite complex, where do they start to look at ... What are the important measurements. What are the ones that are going to make a difference? How do you start to perhaps identify those? Brian MacNeice: Yeah, so, I think the first thing to do is to really strip back if ... We talked previously about focus. Strip the organization back to its bare minimum. What is the underlying economic engine that drives success in our business? How is success defined in our business? Try and isolate as few measures as you can get it down to. The fewer the better, so that you really are focused on those key things that really do genuinely matter. Then make them very visible and transparent for people. There's a couple of mistakes that we see organizations make regularly when it comes to using performance measures to help drive performance. The first thing is they measure far too many things, so whilst they're measuring some of their really relevant stuff, they're also measuring a whole pile of other stuff that may not necessarily distinguish you from your competitors in terms of defining you as high performing. Really focus in on the things that matter most and try and exclusively measure around those. The second thing is that measures tend to be, in some organizations, quite hidden. If I go deep down into the organization, several areas down in bigger organizations and ask people, "How are we tracking on performance? Do you know? Are you clear on whether we're winning or losing?" What you find in an awful lot of organizations is a lot of people deep down in the organization just don't know. The more that you make that performance and the measures that define our performance visible to people, the more than that helps the figure out how they can influence that on a day to day basis. Keeping people connected to the measures that really matter, that's a really important element of any high performing organization. Grant Leboff: When you talk about metrics, because of course an organization can literally be measuring hundreds of things and I understand it's picking those ones that really make the difference, how many ultimately can an organization manage? If you were going to disseminate this through every employee and everybody's going to know, I know there's not going to be one figure but typically, how many measures can you start to use before it's becoming too much? There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order make it more readable.