Note to My Future Me
If you're steering your organization with just one KPI, you're not managing. You're hoping.
Before you read on, a quick warning:
What follows might shift your perspective on organizations—maybe even radically.
Turn back. Take the blue pill. Keep your beliefs unchanged - about your team, your department, your business unit, your company, your industry.
Or keep reading…and risk taking off the frog goggles. And see things differently.
You’ve been warned :-)
Crash Course in Controlling
When people hear the word “controlling,” they often think of numbers, spreadsheets, maybe men in gray suits with ties, horn-rimmed glasses, and little sense of humor—or the latest cost-cutting initiative (#travelpolicy).
Others associate management and control with something more exciting:
a Formula 1 car, the cockpit of a jumbo jet, or a conductor leading an orchestra.
All of these associations are valid (although the “no humor in controlling” cliché has been thoroughly debunked since Dilbert).
One of the most interesting questions in leadership is this:
If your organization were a vehicle, what would it be—and how would you steer it?
Large pharmaceutical companies might resemble massive tankers or aircraft carriers.
Startups, depending on their complexity, could be small planes, mid-sized cars—or even a donkey cart.
The key point:
Different vehicles require different steering mechanisms.
(Some people spend years studying this. You’re welcome.)
Make KPI Great Again
Organizations are steered using metrics—so-called KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
Just like vehicles, some KPIs are more suitable for certain organizations than others.
There’s also a distinction between:
- strategic KPIs (aggregated, high-level), and
- operational KPIs (detailed, process-oriented)
In the best case, they are complete in themselves and aligned with each other—but let’s not go too deep here.
Examples?
Altitude, speed, fuel level—or even your navigation system.
One important logistics KPI is delivery reliability (OTIF: On Time In Full).
It consists of two components:
- timeliness (Was it delivered exactly on time—neither early nor late?)
- completeness (Was the full quantity delivered in the required quality?)
The calculation is straightforward:
A delivery is either successful (1) or not (0). No gray area—just success or failure.
Over a given period, delivery reliability is the percentage of successful deliveries out of total deliveries—up to a maximum of 100%.
Delivery Reliability – Risks and Side Effects
So the question is:
Is delivery reliability a good strategic KPI for steering an organization?
In operations, many deliveries can be repeated.
If something fails once, it can often be corrected and delivered successfully the next time.
But in projects—especially IT projects—the situation is different.
Projects often have a critical path of dependencies.
Once that path is disrupted, the delivery success of the entire project can effectively drop to zero—long before the planned end.
That makes delivery reliability a risky KPI if used in isolation.
The Fruits of Insight
Delivery reliability is just one KPI among many.
In IT, for example, other useful metrics include:
- technical debt
- innovation rate
- solution stability
- economic output per employee
Every organization has both the freedom and the responsibility to choose its own mix of KPIs.
Think of it like a fruit salad:
If you base your entire diet on a single fruit—especially one borrowed from someone else’s garden—you might eventually question whether a more balanced mix would have been the better strategy.
What to Do
-
Define SMART goals
What can be measured can be managed. -
Choose the right KPIs
KPIs are only as good as their fit for purpose.
There is no universal metric for success. -
Follow the PDCA cycle
Plan what you do.
Do what you plan.
Measure the results with meaningful KPIs.
Learn and adapt—continuously, including your KPIs.
Which KPIs actually help you track your goals?
#KPI #deliveryreliability #controlling #notestomyfutureme
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