Problems
In practice, overseeing key performance indicators can prove expensive or difficult for organizations. Some indicators such as staff morale may be impossible to quantify. As such dubious KPIs can be adopted that can be used as a rough guide rather than a precise benchmark.
Another serious issue in practice is that once a measure is created, it becomes difficult to adjust to changing needs as historical comparisons will be lost. As such measures are kept even if of dubious relevance, because history does exist.
Comparisons between different organizations are often difficult as they depend on specific in-house practices and policies.
Key performance indicators can also lead to perverse incentives and unintended consequences as a result of employees working to the specific measurements at the expense of the actual quality or value of their work. For example, measuring the productivity of a software development team in terms of source lines of code encourages copy and paste code and over-engineered design, leading to bloated code bases that are particularly difficult to maintain, understand and modify.
Read more about this topic: Performance Indicator
Famous quotes containing the word problems:
“If we fail to meet our problems here, no one else in the world will do so. If we fail, the heart goes out of progressives throughout the world.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“Belonging to a group can provide the child with a variety of resources that an individual friendship often cannot—a sense of collective participation, experience with organizational roles, and group support in the enterprise of growing up. Groups also pose for the child some of the most acute problems of social life—of inclusion and exclusion, conformity and independence.”
—Zick Rubin (20th century)
“I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that.”
—Julius J. Epstein, U.S. screenwriter, Philip Epstein, screenwriter, Howard Koch, screenwriter, and Michael Curtiz. Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart)