Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Bible

Defining Your Key Performance Indicators

Your key performance indicators follow the goals of your organization. Because KPIs are very popular for managing business objectives, they can definitely be overused so that you see a myriad of green, yellow, and red lights on every site you traverse. The planning process will help you identify the appropriate indicators for your goals and define an action for each of those indicators. Finally, you can determine where and how these indicators will appear on your sites.

Defining indicators

Each indicator that you define for your portal should reflect the scope and goals of your organization. If your organization has a detailed planning process that results in yearly and quarterly goals for each department, the exercise of discovering the indicators for your portal should be a cake-walk. If your organization has a five-year business plan where the only goal is to make profit, defining indicators will be a more time-consuming process.

Here’s how we recommend defining the indicators for your organization or division:

1. Work with business unit managers to discover their yearly and quarterly goals. If you are supporting a centralized organization, you may want to start with the top organizational goals and then work through each of the departments that support those goals. As you discover each goal, document the group that it applies to and the timeframe in which the organization will work to achieve the goal.

2. Translate each goal into a sentence ...