Performance analysis has always been a challenging activity for most managers. The challenge has multiple dimensions, such as setting the right goals which are aligned with desired business outcomes, aligning stakeholders with the objectives, and transferring the big picture to all involved parties in a comprehendible manner. KPI Composer in ServiceNow is a great free tool that can help many managers to overcome the aforesaid challenge. It closes the gap between a strategy you define to measure performance and establishing a technical method to measure it.

The Logic Behind KPI Composer

KPI composer helps managers to visually illustrate his/her performance management strategy in a logical hierarchy known as the ‘KPI Tree’. There are three levels of components in a KPI tree.

With the KPI composer, you can refine your performance management strategy in above mentioned three levels. The tool assists you in visually depicting this, which can then be transferred to technical teams who can build dashboards to track the progress towards achieving the goal. The tool does this job by taking the manager through a few phases as follows.

Analysis Phase – Within this first phase, you will define your goals. Managers and teams will have to spend some quality time clearly identifying priorities and critical goals. The goals will then be broken down from the success factor aspect. Once the success factors are defined, the manager can think about meaningful and effective measurements to quantify each success factor. Completing this activity will mark the analysis phase as done.

Dashboard Visualization Phase – A dashboard will be the ultimate product of this exercise. However, it should not be just a dashboard but one which would assist the manager and the team in achieving a specific goal. In this second phase, the manager will have the opportunity to depict how the dashboard would look according to the defined metrics in the previous phase.

Data Definition Phase – This is the phase where each measurement will be defined in technical terms. The manager will get to define how each measurement should be calculated, which ultimately will be transferred to ServiceNow technical teams. Having these measurements defined by the manager will prevent errors and time taking back-and-forth communications between the requester of the dashboard and the ServiceNow administrators.

Review Phase – The review phase allows all stakeholders to review what they built throughout the journey. By this time, a visual built will be available for everyone to easily understand the final output, which is a dashboard.

Summary

KPI Composer is a free tool that can increase the success rate of one’s performance strategy. Many organizations and managers struggle with the technical realization of their performance strategy and for the ServiceNow users, this is a gem of a tool to overcome the challenges.