What are the best tools or methods to track and report on your project KPIs?

It's all too common to fall into the trap of measuring what's easy to measure instead of the actual markers of success and this can sometimes be worse than not measuring anything at all. Your top performers are going to change their work routine to make their KPIs move in a positive direction, especially if compensation is tied to KPI performance. You get what you measure, so you need to make sure you're measuring what you need rather than coming up with a bunch of metrics and hoping it works out.

Tools like Microsoft Project, Asana, or Trello are great for tracking project KPIs. They offer features for setting milestones, tracking progress, and generating reports. Using a balanced scorecard approach or Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dashboards in Excel or Google Sheets can also provide a comprehensive view of project performance. Additionally, project management software with built-in analytics, such as Monday.com or Smartsheet, can automate data collection and reporting processes, saving time and ensuring accuracy in KPI monitoring. It's essential to choose tools that align with your project's complexity, team size, and reporting requirements to effectively track and report on KPIs.

The key to building a useful dashboard is intended audience, so plan to have multiple dashboards. For my customers, I recommend having at least three. Senior Leadership This dashboard needs to tell the story of your team's performance and needs. You also want to lay your dashboard out in a way that makes it easy to take screenshots to drop in a slide deck. Process Managers This is the dashboard that your team uses to manage the process. You want metrics that indicate process health, but also that allow your team to spot patterns and react to them. Process Users A dashboard is a great way to eliminate all those "Hey, what's going on with my request??" emails your team gets.

I recommend 3 aspects: 1. User Needs and Goals: Understand the specific needs and goals of the end-users who will be interacting with the dashboard. 2. Data Quality and Integration: Ensure that the data feeding into the dashboard is accurate, up-to-date, and integrated from reliable sources. 3. Usability and Design: Design the dashboard to be intuitive and easy to navigate, with clear visualizations that communicate insights effectively.

I would caution away from setting up automatic reports because it's way too easy for automated emails to become background noise at work. Any report you manually compile needs to do more than just summarize the data. After all, your audience should already have the numbers from your well designed dashboards, right?

Use data to tell a story. Curated reports that showcases the KPIs that tell a story. Avoid using automated reports that showcase every KPIs you track. Too much information leads to lack of clarity and confusion.

Everybody who manages a team has done the “I need your team’s numbers by EOD” scramble for their senior leader. A lot of tools have basic KPIs built in, but are they the KPIs you need? The best automation tools are going to let you capture the exact measures you need *and* keep those measures up to date automatically. I love helping my customers build a self-measuring process and making this scramble no sweat at all.

The point of measuring a process is to make informed decisions about how to change that process. If you have KPIs that you aren't routinely using in your decision making, you need to drop them. I warn my customers that the risk of bad KPIs is that you're generating noise, instead of information, and you're training people to ignore the dashboard that you're spending time and money to bring online.

The ultimate goal of tracking and reporting on project KPIs is to learn and improve performance. By measuring and communicating KPIs, you gain insights into what works and what needs improvement. Use KPIs to celebrate successes, motivate your team, and demonstrate value to clients. They help identify and implement corrective actions, preventive measures, or continuous improvement initiatives. In my experience, regularly reviewing KPIs during sprint retrospectives has been invaluable. It highlighted areas needing adjustment and reinforced successful practices, driving project success and team morale. This iterative approach ensures ongoing project enhancement.

Your KPIs should evolve over time to address current challenges. A pre-seed startup can prioritize measuring customer acquisition, while a Series A company might concentrate on customer retention. A less mature company may focus on fundamentals such as cash flow and a mature company may focus on more finessed KPIs.

Everyone who owns a process has a gut feeling about how their process is working. That gut feeling is based on your experience and is valuable. However, it's not helpful when communicating with the rest of your organization; you can't put a gut feeling into a spreadsheet or justify increased headcount. When I'm working with customers who are new to KPIs, I tell them a good place to start is coming up with ways to measure their gut feelings. Sometimes they get surprised and their gut was wrong, but often they end up with evidence proving what they already knew that they can use to build credibility within their organization.

Concentrating on maintaining good data hygiene and employing a uniform and consistent calculation methodology can significantly improve the value of KPIs, even when using a simple Excel spreadsheet. An expensive tool cannot make up for substandard data practices.