Gathering KPIs
A KPI is a measure that enables an organization to determine the current state of the business and the progress being made towards business goals. The business leaders you are talking to will be familiar with the importance of such metrics, given that they likely already manage their business using some of them in spreadsheets or dashboards.
Your goal is to identify specific KPIs that will help the business leaders deliver the CSFs that they identified in our interview. The KPIs are usually gathered when the CSFs are identified.
We've seen technology folks, particularly in IT, insist that they know what the business wants without a need for interviews. While they might have knowledge of the most important CSFs, when the discussion turns to the potential business benefits and the KPIs needed to run the business, they often begin to realize that appropriate line of business interviews and discovery makes sense (especially when it becomes clear that there are many follow-up questions). Of course, we always keep IT in the loop regarding what we are discovering.
Let's look at the KPIs that might be identified in our supply chain optimization example. We'll view them in the form that we presented earlier, which is now partially completed:
We've left the priorities column blank for now, as this is a discussion we'll have with all three lines of business present. During a follow-up meeting, we will first summarize the CSFs and KPIs we've documented and validate that we haven't missed anything during these interviews.
Do we think we will have a business case for a project? At this point, we are encouraged. The revenue and savings impacts are in the millions of dollars. If these impacts were only in the tens of thousands of dollars, we would rightly be skeptical that the project would be able to demonstrate a positive return on investment once we figured out the costs of procurement, development, deployment, and ongoing management of the solution.
These CSFs were all related to the supply chain inefficiency problem and a single project. You might find a much more varied set of CSFs present when you perform discovery across a diverse organization that will lead to several unique projects. Regardless, the approach used is the same.