Ten Common Reasons Why Organizations Get Their Measures Radically Wrong

  1. Measuring too much e.g. aiming a service level to all customers when we should be focusing effort on key customers
  2. A lack of connectivity with the organization’s critical success factors
  3. Treating all measures as KPIs
  4. KPIs being driven by performance related pay
  5. A tendency to over rely on financial measures
  6. Relying too much on past measures
  7. Cherry picking measures from KPI databases
  8. Mixing measures with targets, initiatives and milestones
  9. A few vague words does not make a performance measure e.g. customer loyalty program.
  10. Designed by untrained staff

Source: Extracted from

Key Performance Indicators – developing, implementing and using winning KPIs (4th Edition)