Creating KPIs - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 389

19.1 What Is a KPI?
A key performance indicator is a type of performance measurement used to evaluate the
success of an organization or a particular activity. Generally KPIs are used to encourage an
organization or team to reach a particular goal.
KPIs should be directly tied to the organization's strategy, vision, or mission. Generally
they come from executive management but often other levels of management create KPIs
for their own purposes, usually as a way of furthering the KPIs relevant to them.
A well-defined KPI follows the SMART criteria: S pecific, M easurable, A chievable,
R elevant, and T ime-phrased. Itisspecific, unambiguously defined andnotoverly broad.It
ismeasurablesothatsuccessorfailurecanbeobjectively quantified.Itisachievable under
reasonablecircumstances. Itisrelevanttothesuccessoftheorganizationasawhole,orthe
project as a whole. It is time-phrased, which means the relevant time period is specified.
Goals should be measurable so that one can unambiguously determine what fraction of
the goal was achieved, or if it was achieved at all. Things you can count, such as uptime,
disk space, and the number of major features released this month, are all measurable.
Example measurable goals include the following:
• Provide 10T of disk space to each user.
• Page load time less than 300 ms.
• Fewer than 10 “severity 1” open bugs.
• Launch 10 major features this month.
• 99.99 percent service uptime.
Non-measurable goals cannot be quantified or do not include a specific numerical goal.
Some examples are shown here:
• Get better at writing Python code.
• Get better at failing over to DR systems.
• Provide more free disk space.
• Make pages load faster.
These are all good things, of course. They could all be turned into measurable goals.
However, as stated, they are not measurable.
KPIs go by many different names. Sometimes they are informally called “metrics,”
which is true in the sense that a KPI is a kind of metric—the kind used to drive organiza-
tional behavior. However, that would be like calling oranges “fruit” and expecting people
to know you mean a specific kind of fruit.