15 Anti-Patterns To Spoil Your KPIs Most Effectively

15 Anti-Patterns To Spoil Your Metrics As Fast As Possible

Imagine, your organisation wants to introduce metrics and KPIs expecting strategic improvements. How should you behave?

For the sake of your company, follow these bits of advice.

1. Do not ask for goals or purpose of the improvements. – All metrics are arbitrary.
2. In any event, upper management has their own personal views – which are mutually completely incompatible.
3. Throw in your metrics right at the beginning. – Goals and purposes are irrelevant (see 1).
4. Metrics matter. – Do not ask for relevant reasonable arguments.
5. Do not define any follow-up action for a metric status change. – To develop any potentially helpful action will exceed all your organisational intellectual capacities.
6. Nobody cares about reasonable follow-up actions for a metric status change. – Management is satisfied by immediate and spontaneous reactions only. – The more the best, since it shows business agility to react fast as its best.
7. Do not thrive for simplicity. – Metrics stemming from rocket science attest you being an egg head.
8. Only the dashboards must be appealing, nothing else. – Nobody questions the data if they are presented in a colourful way (see 1.).
9. Data and information relevance are totally overestimated (see 1.).
10. Satisfy the finance guys only. – KPIs are always only about money and costs only.
11. KPIs about scheduling and timing are neglectable. – The customer is always willing to negotiate.
12. Totally ignore the KPIs about quality. – Forget these pale QA guys sitting in the cellar, in a dark room. They only whine at the end when nothing can't be rescued anymore. The finance guys instead, are more important since they whine right from the beginning.
13. Define as much KPIs as possible. – All people preaching KPI modesty are wimps. The more your dashboard is cluttered the best and you will be the Hero.
14. Make the data collecting process for your employees as cumbersome as possible. – Your employees will love you when they waste half of their work time in addition to only measure useless data nobody cares about.
15. Introduce as many incompatible KPI tracking tools as possible. – Your employees will be happy being waked up from their office naps and be asked to synchronize tediously inconsistent values coming from incompatible data sources.

Are you upset and feel offended by this post? – Perfect, the post fits its purpose!

You do not feel offended? – Perhaps, your organisation has by now not reached the necessary maturity level to understand these points in all its brilliance and details.

Do It The Right Way