Something to Consider January 2018 3

Why Your KPIs Are Causing Conflict and How To Fix It

Everyone talks about KPIs, most people are using them, but few are doing it very well. There’s a lot of factors involved in driving effective KPIs, that work for you, instead of hindering you. KPI conflict often represents the biggest hurdle to measurement success.

​The use of the metaphor in this weeks article sums up the issue of KPI conflict succinctly: ‘Imagine your business has a bin full of candy. You tell one employee to keep as much candy as possible in the bin, while you tell another to use that candy to attract customers. Wouldn’t these two employees end up in a standoff?’

Sabrina Chamberlain of RAPP has articulated 4 key recommendations which you can read here ​on how to fix KPI conflicts when they manifest between departments.

This reflects our research and customer experiences with KPI’s – organisation wide dialogue is necessary to ensure the likelihood of conflict is minimised. Avoid ‘death by KPI’ syndrome – make sure the ones you set are absolutely necessary, the more you have the more likely conflict will occur. We ran a session around this topic at the end of last year, with advice for any stage of your KPI journey, whether you are drowning in a sea of KPI’s or don’t know where to start, there are steps to take to ensure KPI’s are optimised to perform as they were designed. The recording can be found here

Our ‘Something To Consider’ snippets are framed as small, digestible, ‘dashes of insight’ around the pillars of what we define as “World Class Finance” – Process Optimization, Financial Control and Compliance, and Risk Assurance, all underpinned by technology enablement and integration.