Hello Everyone,
Currently I'm working on project with the scope of reviewing the current performance management system and setting new KPI's. My challenge goes like this:
1) What is the balanced no. of KPI's/individual/process? I need something from your experience, not from "the books" :)
2) Any suggestion of KPI's for Risk & Legal (Top Mngmt to execution level)? Specifically, how do you break down the "cost of risk" from Director to execution level?
Thank you,

Hi Ionut,
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1) The balanced no. of KPIs/individual/process is around 4-5 KPIs.
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Remember Focus on everything = Focus on nothing.
From my experience more than 5 KPIs is too much but I did meet lots of managers that want to follow too many KPIs. What I do when working with these managers is try to present them the main categories of KPIs:
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After I give them some examples of KPIs I ask them to put 2-3 KPIs in each category and then to prioritise these so that at the end they have 4-5 KPIs . I then tell them that KPIs are not set in stone and that you can always replace them according to your business priorities and the customer requirements. You need to set goals for topics you are focusing now.Â
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The next step after choosing the KPIs is setting a goal for them. Another mistake I see in KPI setting is that people are overly ambitious when setting a target. The "A" in SMART means "Achievable" and people tend to forget that.
If you have an ambitious target in mind (i.e. improve FTR rate by 50%), it's better to set a short term more achievable target (i.e. improve FTR rate by 20% in 6 months). Very long term goals should be broken down, so they can guide the team in the short term.
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2) How do you break down the "cost of risk" from Director to execution level?
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Goals and KPIs should never be at the same level. To be meaningful, KPIs need to be tailor-made for each level and cascaded top-down.
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For example, if a CEO has as a target to reduce the operational risk of a company, you can't cascade the same KPI to the executional level. If you do that, nothing will happen because the executional level won't be able to action goals that are not specific to the team.
In this example, it would be better to have a structure like this:
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This way everyone understands what their role is to meet the goal and whether they are on track.
In order to cascade a "big elephant" KPI such as risk reduction, you need to break it down into smaller chunks. For that, you can use standard problem solving methodology such as A3 problem solving.
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Hope this helps.
M.