From my experience in building dashboards for about 100 companies, I don’t recommend measuring the same KPI over multiple different time periods. It adds extra detail which leads to complexity and a lack of clarity. It can also convey false results. You might hit your target for the week, but miss your target for the month, so the result is that you have failed. However, if the scorecard shows both your weekly and monthly targets it looks like you have hit 50% of them.
Our recommendation is: Decide what period is most applicable for each KPI type and only show that.
For example:
- Phone calls are something you need to maintain a regular cadence on, so weekly usually works best. Daily doesn’t work very well when you are out of the office on some days or doing tasks in blocks. Monthly doesn’t work very well as you could put off doing calls until the last week and still hit your target, but doing that isn’t good for multiple reasons.
- Sales however – unless you are doing low value / high volume – usually work best monthly, or even quarterly for slower sales cycles. On the PM dashboard you have 4 sales transactions so far for this month. Showing those against a daily or weekly target is nearly meaningless; sure you will smash the target on the day a sale comes in which will look great for Daily Sales, but you might be way behind your overall target.
- Sales is also the exception to the “1 time period per KPI” rule where you might want to show the yearly results as well.
- Meetings usually work best either weekly or monthly, this often depends on how far you travel for them. If you are travelling longer you tend to bunch them up so monthly might work better.
The end result of doing this is that each person now only has 3 things to think about for each KPI:
- What is the target?
- When is it due?
- What have I done so far?
There are many different theories about the science and psychology of setting targets, but nearly everyone agrees that making them simple to understand means they are more likely to be reached.