KPIs - Using Bamboo KPI Column for Effective Project Management

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are valuable quantifiable measurements for quickly comparing the progress made against measurable goals, the end results of which reflect the critical success factors of an organization. SharePoint comes with Web Parts for presenting key performance indicators, but they are only available in the MOSS Enterprise edition. If you are running Windows SharePoint Services or SharePoint Server Standard, KPIs are not available. In this blog, I will share with you why KPIs are important to the success of a project, and introduce you to our upcoming Bamboo KPI Column.

What do you want out of KPIs?

• Reliable and precise snapshots of various critical success factors at a high level – so that your organization can draw conclusions at-a-glance regarding the current state of a project.
• Integrate with other mission critical data of an organization - provides a unique perspective on the effectiveness of all the efforts.
• Automate  - so that it allows your organization to focus on the proactive process.
• Customize objectives to meet your organization’s goal - so that your organization can take actions, such as carrying out a contingency plan, based on readily available information. 

Bamboo KPI Column is a custom column available for both WSS and MOSS. It allows you to reference and read any list (Issues, Risks, Tasks, etc.) from a Site Collection, determine how values are computed (using average, sum, count, etc.) and display the values in WSS3 and MOSS as visual indicators based on the results. With the KPI Column, you can customize, integrate and automate your KPI dashboard based on who’ll be consuming status information.

Create indicator for Issues:

Create indicator for schedule/overdue tasks:

Create indicator for risks:

The KPI Dashboard:

Schedule Status – shows 147 overdue tasks.
Issues Status – shows 6 active issues.
Risk Status – shows only 1 active risk.

The proactive process is for the team to review the overdue tasks --and based on their priority, to determine whether additional resources are needed, or if the scope needs to be reviewed in order to remove some requirements from the current phase-- so that the project will be on time and change from being in the RED to GREEN. The team needs to review the active issues with their categories and priorities in order to come to the conclusion as to what actions will need to be taken to resolve those issues ---so that the project will change from the YELLOW to GREEN.

Note: If the risk values are high, the team would know what mitigation plan or contingency plan should be carried out. This information should have already been recorded in the Risks list during the earlier brainstorming sessions.

You can choose three types of icons for the visual indicators: check mark, traffic light or flat. You can also customize the text you would like to show for the tooltips or the display. You can create other types of KPIs from referencing your existing lists.

Your project dashboard list can be mapped to the SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard to roll up to the portfolio level. Once the mapping is done, the next time the data is updated at the project level, it will be automatically updated at the portfolio level via Event Receiver.

Bamboo KPI Column is available for purchase by itself, or as a bundled component of one of the following product offerings:

• SharePoint Custom Column Pack
• SharePoint Project Management Central
• SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard
• Bamboo Project Management Suite
• Bamboo Ultimate Suite

Please share your thoughts by commenting on how you think you can use Bamboo KPI column for other types of KPI dashboards.