Key performance indicators (KPIs) help everyone in your company feel aligned and motivated to work towards a specific outcome.
While each individual team member should have personal goals to aim towards, all work should be tied to overall company KPIs. Knowing which KPIs are most important is the tricky part.
As a company owner or manager, you have the best idea of where you want to see growth and how you want to track it, and this applies to every team within your organization. Different departments are responsible for multiple areas of growth, so it makes sense that your Service Team KPIs will vary from your Project Team KPIs.
We’ve been in this business for a long time and have spoken to plenty of executives along the way and have discovered common threads across the board.
When it comes to your Project Team, we’ve found two KPIs that almost always make it to the top of managers’ lists.
First, let’s get one thing clear
We can’t stress enough that just because we’re listing these top two KPIs, by no means do we believe that other KPIs are less important.
Your discretion is what matters most. When you created your company or started working there, you developed a vision for success and you know best how to carve a path for getting there.
We’re simply here to offer up suggestions and knowledge based on our own experiences. Our goal for BrightGauge is to make your day-to-day life a bit easier, and we hope the guidance we provide here adds to that.
Project Team KPIs
Your Project Team is incredibly important because it’s the team that keeps your work moving and flowing. Adhering to the Service Level Agreement (SLA) you and your client created at the onset of your relationship is critical, and your Project Team is going to play a major role in that.
Specifically, the number of hours your Project Team members bill and how efficiently they stay in line with your budget will show whether or not you’re on track with your SLA. Therefore, two KPIs we recommend when it comes to your Project Team are Billable Project Hours and Over Budget Projects.
Billable Project Hours
Some business owners or team leads require their team members to bill a certain number of hours per week, as it ties into recurring revenue, so keeping track of this metric is pretty important.
It’s also a good idea to see how many hours are being billed to a specific project because it gives you an idea of whether or not you have adequate resources assigned to that project. This also gives you insight into how well your company and team can handle various scopes. If your team is over-billing on a project, it’s possible that you did not forecast an appropriate number of hours for the required amount of work. As you can imagine, these insights come in handy for future projects.
BrightGauge dashboards make it so easy to see every team member’s billable hours in real-time and at a glance. More than likely, we connect with the integration you’re using to input hours (like Harvest, for example), and all our integrations come with pre-built gauges, dashboards, and reports based on the metrics people like you care about the most. This means you’ll be able to get started as soon as you open an account!
Over Budget Projects
Any project manager knows how important it is to stay on budget. Dealing with finances is a sensitive matter and impacts your bottom line, so you really can’t scrutinize it enough.
When you budget a project, you’re setting forth guidelines, just as an SLA does. Abiding by those guidelines makes you reliable and trustworthy and keeps your business running efficiently.
You shouldn’t wait until an accountant or financial manager crunches numbers for you to see if anything is falling through the cracks. It’s much more optimal and productive to know where you stand on a regular and frequent basis.
Tracking projects that have gone over budget will help you course correct and make data-driven decisions that ensure you’re still on a path to success. Just like the insights you gain when looking at billable hours, Over Budget Projects will tell you if you have enough resources on a task or if there are any missing gaps.
Keeping tabs of Over Budget Projects on a real-time dashboard makes it easy to see if you’ve got any glaring issues and it helps prevent problems from turning into full-blown disasters. With BrightGauge, you can drilldown further into the Over Budget Projects gauge to get more information.
BrightGauge helps you keep your team motivated
With BrightGauge dashboards, you’re able to see your important KPIs in one place and use the metrics displayed to drive impactful business decisions.
Beyond that, you can use dashboards to motivate your team. When it comes to billable hours or open projects, put your team members on a leaderboard to inspire a little fun, healthy competition between them.
Or, use our Goals feature to keep everyone accountable and striving for results that impact your bottom line and your overall company KPIs in a good way.
There’s a whole lot you can do with BrightGauge to make your daily operations more manageable and productive. To learn more about KPIs that make a positive impact, check out our free whitepaper, How to Improve Your Business With KPIs.
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