To increase your chances of success, it is essential to ensure follow-up throughout the execution of your project. Project monitoring aims to check that the progress of your project is going well as you had planned and allows you to readjust your strategy if necessary.
In this task, project management KPIs are essential: it is thanks to them that you will be able to objectify your project monitoring by quantifying your performance! They should appear in project reporting that you send to the various stakeholders at regular intervals.
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or key performance indicators are used to assess the performance of your projects.
These numerical indicators of course allow you to know your progress on your objectives, but above all they give you the opportunity to identify the aspects of your project on which you are having difficulties, as well as those on which you are getting good results!
KPIs often allow you to identify the points that need to be optimized to improve the execution of a project. These are the strategic safeguards of project management!
KPIs are therefore a great help in project management: they give you an immediate overview of the status of your project at a given moment!
And the information given by the KPIs will help you make your decisions: if the KPIs are good, do nothing, if they indicate that you are underperforming, take corrective action!
While there are KPIs that are commonly used by many companies, the ideal is still to customize them to your teams and your project.
A typology of indicators has been drawn up:
Anyone who has ever had to manage a project knows that if you are not careful, there is a good chance that you will exceed deadlines, explode budgets, and that the expected quality will not be there.
And it is precisely the role of KPIs to prevent you from finding yourself in this kind of situation. Thanks to them, you will always know where you are in the realization of your project, on each of the aspects mentioned above, but also on all those you want to control!
You are free to create your own KPIs according to your needs.
If we wanted to illustrate the value of KPIs, we could compare project management to rocket piloting.
To summarize: would you take the risk of getting a rocket off the ground without any lights or indicators? Well it would be (at least) just as suicidal to start managing your project, while wanting to achieve optimal execution and profitability, without the help of performance indicators!
If you want your KPIs to be effective and to help you manage your projects, you must meet several criteria. A good indicator should:
Some people like to use color coding with their key indicator. The most common color code is:
The advantage of such a code is to facilitate visibility on all aspects of the project that you measure thanks to your KPIs. In this way, it becomes even easier to discuss the prioritization of efforts with your team: at a glance, everyone knows which aspects of the project are doing well, which ones to watch out for, and which ones need to be rethought.
When you deploy KPIs in the monitoring your project, you must take a few precautions to ensure the effectiveness of your KPIs.
Organizational precautions: You should select the KPIs based on the goals you have discussed and set with your project team. The adoption of KPIs will be simplified if each member of your team understands their value.
Next, you need to assign responsibility for each objective to the right people and define the processes to control their evolution over time. Everyone's responsibilities should be clear to avoid tensions as the project and the KPIs evolve.
Technical precautions: you will need to adapt your project management infrastructure to your KPIs: the way you write your reports and the software you use must be configured to allow you to obtain all the information necessary for your KPIs. These changes can take time, but they can also disrupt your project team: remember to brief them beforehand on the importance of changing their habits in order to benefit from KPIs.
Cultural precautions: Working with KPIs has many consequences on the way your team works: accountability, monitoring everyone's performance or even monitoring compliance with objectives. The ideal is to manage to have an open discussion with your employees prior to the implementation of the KPIs: do they like the concept? Do they understand its usefulness? Do they have apprehensions?
It's really better to discuss everything involved in using KPIs in detail with your project team, rather than discovering during the execution that some were not ready to change their habits!
There are several tips to give your employees confidence:
Most of the time, the KPIs you are going to create will be combined in a project management dashboard : they are tools that simplify the management of projects.
Project management dashboards allow you to measure the performance of your activity on a constant basis in order to optimize your project management processes. In this way, you can use the KPIs optimally and put all the chances on your side to successfully carry out your projects.
