Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

I acknowledge, understand and support the usage of KPIs in anyone's career, as it is a good tool to gauge a person's competency over time. However, I feel that while it helps give a clear 'goals' that lead to a 'bigger' goal for the company, there are one setback I faced a few days ago during a discussion. This setback does not bring to a disadvantage to a company, but it does lessen the overall result of what a company may get.

As a real example, few days back we formed a team to do a specific task. Now, this task involves meeting some people with the hopes that they meet up with us, and thus invest in us. This huge event have several teams set-up, and while our work do not overlap other teams, the results may. For instance, another team is in charge of a bigger scaled picture, to get huge organisations to meet up, and then to invest in us.

Our team, is supposed to go to 'other' places and secure a meeting and hopefully they invest in us. The problem here is, the sentence of "Team A has secured 'number of meetings' and 'amount invested' as their KPIs". This means that should we have the meeting, just because we're in the same company, the meeting number or the investment goes to Team A. To try to focus it down to just "Our KPI will be meetings and investment from organisations in this 'other' places" cannot work, because they may meet with us now. Then they take their sweet time, and six months later approach the organisation as a whole and Team A gets the KPI.

So in the end we dropped the KPI, and concentrate (and try to find other KPIs that other teams did not include into theirs). I find this lessen the earning power of the organisation, but for the sake of having a value placed on the team, it has to be done. Or else the team do the work, but it is never reflected as another team takes the results we obtain, then at the end of the day, our team gave 'nothing' to the company. Also, shared KPIs cannot be accepted anymore as our team was one of the last to be formed, sort of an afterthought.

Now, that s*cks. Hehe.... finding unique KPIs is quite a challenge.