Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) or measures is critical during a project.

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Tracking KPIs can help you understand where you’re succeeding and where you aren’t.

Without them, it’s difficult to see how you’re progressing toward your goals. But how do you know what you should measure for each project?

Overwhelming your team with data won't make the project succeed, but providing the right data, at the right time, ensures the project stays on track.

Are your projects actually helping your organization succeed? This field guide helps ensure you're tracking the right projects and the right KPIs.

What are Project KPIs?

Back in the day, if a project was on time and on budget, it was considered a success. That’s no longer the case. While time and budget are still considered important factors, they aren’t the only determinants of value. You may also want to know whether the project helped you achieve the intended goals, and if the amount and types of resources you dedicated to it were appropriate and even optimal. Today’s project managers use a variety of KPIs, which generally fall into these four categories:

• Timeliness: This is making sure your project is done on time—and if it’s not, tracking where it’s off-target is important so you can always have an estimated completion date.
• Budget: Are you going to stay under the budget you’ve allocated, or is the project exceeding costs?
• Quality: How well has the project progressed? Are those working on it or benefitting from it satisfied?
• Effectiveness: Are you spending your time and money appropriately, or could you be managing the project more effectively?

Note that not every project may require measurements in all these categories. Before your organization gets down to work, it’s important for both the strategic management board and the project management office to discuss what factors will determine a project’s success and, by extension, which measures will matter most.

4 Tips For Creating & Using Project KPIs Effectively

1. Make your KPIs clear and focused. Project management KPI templates can be helpful, but it’s most important for KPIs to be S.M.A.R.T: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. ‍For example, let’s say one of the strategic objectives of a local government is to provide quality, diverse housing options that make city living attainable for a wide range of groups and income levels. An appropriate KPI for your local government might be to increase the number of affordable housing units, with a target of rehabilitating 1,000 existing structures per year to meet public needs. This KPI is SMART because it’s specific (pertaining to rehabilitating structures to create affordable housing units), measurable (it has a target number), attainable (it’s doable with the right strategies), relevant (it directly impacts goal achievement), and time-bound (it’s measured yearly).

2. Choose your measures with purpose. Too many organizations track things simply because they always have, but that leads to an overabundance of questionable KPIs. We recommend tracking just a few important measures—those that are most relevant to what you’re trying to achieve. If you can’t explain why a particular KPI is important, that's a good enough reason to drop it. Keep in mind that the more KPIs you have, the more effort it takes to report on them. (Not to mention, you’ll be inundated with information that makes it harder to determine what’s important and what’s not.)

3. Always include a target. Organizations just starting out with KPIs sometimes feel they don’t have enough historical information to assign an accurate target. But working without a target adds a level of subjectivity to the measurement—how do you know if you’re doing well or not? We recommend picking KPIs for which you can make an educated guess on a target using industry research or historical information.