Announcing Bamboo's KPI Column: Check our stats before you wreck your stats

If you're using SharePoint, chances are you work in a pretty data-rich environment. But, are you really doing all you can to leverage that data to measure and drive your company's performance? In most cases, the answer is "probably not". For most companies, this usually boils down to simply having too much data, and too little time. To actually turn all that stored "data" into "information", you need to make it both useful, and digestable. So, what if rather than constantly having to manually pull and "massage" data to see how things are doing, you could put all of that data to use and be able to tell how things were performing (or underperforming) in just a few seconds?

That's where "Key Performance Indicators" (KPIs) come in. KPI's let you know at glance how something is measuing up to expectations. Whether it's sales figures vs. projections, or the total number of open vs. closed support tickets, KPIs let you apply business logic to your data once, and get a simple visual indication going forward that lets you see how something is measuring up to expectations.

To that end, Bamboo now offers a KPI solution for SharePoint that allows you to define perfomance thresholds, and automatically compare those to an existing SharePoint column to see how things are performing. You can use the total number of items in a column, the sum of those items, their average, the min or max value, or even the % of items out of the total in a specific view to measure exactly what you need, the way you need.

The column automatically calculates the results, and displays one of 3 indicators (good, bad, or neutral). You can also show the actual value, and target value if desired, and there are multiple icon sets to select from, so you can choose the one that best fits your application.

The Bamboo KPI Column even includes a Web Part that lets you display your KPIs vertically instead of horizontally, so you can create dashboard-style layouts.

While it has been in use for a while as part of Bamboo's Project Management Central (PM Central), Bamboo KPI Column is now available on its own (or as part of the Custom Column Pack). Download your free trial copy today, and see what you can accomplish when you have the visibility you need to manage perfomance.