KPI Dashboards for High Growth Businesses

One of the biggest challenges of a high growth business is managing communication. Paradoxically, communication within a company must increase exponentially as the number of employees grows. As more employees are hired, more layers of management are put in place, more planning must happen, and finally more communication must take place in a variety of forms. Dashboards with key performance indicators (KPIs) are a good communication mechanism to get team members on the same page.

Our most recent project has been updating our internal KPI dashboard based on recommendations in the book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits. Currently, we’re tracking the following on our dashboard:

• Current ratio
• Recognized revenue
• New bookings
• New bugs
• Percentage of productive engineering hours

As you might have guessed, it is simple and not quite holistic enough to capture input from all of our different departments. We’re working on moving our dashboard to track the following categories, broken out by department:

• Sales
  – Bookings
  – Weighted Pipeline
• Marketing
  – Qualified Leads
  – Opportunity Value from Marketing Leads
• Services
  – Billed Hours
  – Overrun Hours
• Support
  – New Tickets
  – Closed Tickets
• Engineering
  – Development Hours
  – New Bugs
• Operations
  – Current Assets
  – Average Days Sales Outstanding

In addition to expanding the number of metrics we track, the other major change we’re implementing is color coding the values based on percent of goal. The Google Spreadsheet cells are colored according to the following values:

• Red: 0 – 74% of goal
• Yellow: 75 – 89% of goal
• Green: 90 – 109% of goal
• Dark Green: 110%+ of goal

I’m excited about the changes we’re implementing. Let me know about experiences in your company related to KPIs and dashboards and I’ll keep you posted as to how it works out for us.