Identifying Key Performance Indicators
If you have not been provided any KPIs to begin with, then you might start by identifying the pain points of the business you are dealing with — in other words, the reason this project has been started in the first place.
It might be that the business is spending more than they would like in support costs, or they are not yielding a certain number of results (sales, transactions, emails - whatever it is the business does)
If you start by identifying the top costs to the business, as quantitatively as possible, that gives you a starting line, and a budget.
Example
Let's take a really generic example:
Acme Company sells widgets, and the product you have been tasked to deliver is a sales tool for Reps to use out in the field.
The top pain points might be given to you as:
- Reps do not have the right information to hand at the right time, hindering their ability to sell
- Reps are dealing with tools that crash frequently
- There is a delay between when Reps make a sale, and the Business registers it, so that it's hard for the business to measure the effectiveness of Reps
Solutions
This could be translated into solutions:
- Let's build a product that gives Reps the information they need, when they need it
- Let's fix or replace the tools they use with more reliable ones
- Let's implement a new solution that gives the business real-time visibility over Reps performance
Key Performance Indicators
Success for these proposed solutions might look like:
- 10% increase in sales volume
- 100 fewer support calls per week
- 20% decrease in Rep overtime fees
With these KPIs in hand, you can quantify the projected value of your project (10% increase in sales volume equals $amount, support calls cost $amount each so 100 fewer per week should save $amount * 100 per week) and so on.
Hope that is helpful to you. The bottom line is that KPIs are specific to the business and the project. They are the metrics that you select in order to define success, typically provided by the business or stakeholder.