Getting eyes on your KPIs!

The SquaredUp motto is Measure What Matters – sometimes though, the processes that really matter can be located at numerous different points up, down and across your organisational landscape. This can make surfacing your most important measures – i.e. your KPIs – somewhat problematic. At SquaredUp, we have been thinking hard about this problem and have now released the initial version of our solution – KPI roll-ups. With some very lightweight configuration you can now define any metric as a KPI and it will automatically be exposed in your high level organizational views.

KPI proliferation

Defining, monitoring and evaluating KPIs is obviously an established practice followed by virtually every organisation (even if they don't explicitly use the term KPIs). Whilst KPIs can be relatively easy to define, for many modern enterprises the task of monitoring them can be more problematic. This is not necessarily because making the individual measurements is difficult. Often the challenge is that the data is distributed across multiple different systems – each of which may only be able to surface a subset of your overall corporate KPIs.

Whilst objectives such as OKRs are set at the organizational level, KPI's can be scoped at lower levels and can be applied to multiple teams and business units. You may have a KPI for responding to a sales enquiry but your organisation might be split into four regions and each region may have five sales teams. This means that this KPI will need to be tracked across 20 disparate teams.

The SquaredUp solution

Let's take a step-by-step look at using SquaredUp to create KPIs and then surfacing them across your organisation. In your own organisation there may be many kinds of metrics which you might want to use as KPIs:

• DORA metrics
• Service Level Objectives
• Cloud costs

And many others! We will use the example of an organization with four regions (UK North, UK East, UK South and UK West) – which will be represented in SquaredUp as Workspaces. Each region has its own IT Team, which has a KPI for the maximum number of P1 (i.e. top priority) Incidents that can occur over a given period.

In your organization you may have many different KPI types that you may wish to compare across teams or business units. Our first step, therefore, is to define a Type for our KPI. To do this, just click on the Settings option on the main SquaredUp menu and click on KPI and then on the Add new KPI type button. We are going to call our Type ‘Incident Responses’:

In order to track this metric in SquaredUp, all we need is a data source with a numerical value. This could originate from a Work Item Store such as JIRA or Azure DevOps, a ticketing system such as ZenDesk or even just a value from a CSV file. I am going to use a very simple CSV Raw Text data source as it will make it easy to follow along.

In the screenshot below, we have a dashboard tile showing the total number of P1 incidents for the IT Team in our UK East Region:

This is actually powered by a very simple CSV data source which consists of just a Header called Total and then the value 5:

Creating a Monitor

The first thing that we are going to do is create a Monitor from this value. When we create a Monitor in SquaredUp, we specify a value and then set a lower or upper threshold. If the value breaches this threshold, then an error state is displayed in the SquaredUp UI.

If you edit a tile in SquaredUp you will see a Monitoring tab in the right-hand side panel of the editor:

If you click on the tab and enable Monitoring by moving the slider to the right, you can see a set of configuration options:

In this instance we are monitoring the value in our Total column and setting an error condition if the value is greater than 4.

Once you create a Monitor for a tile, you will see that a Status Indicator appears next to the tile header. For a healthy monitor this will take the form of a reassuringly calming green circle, but if the threshold is breached it will show a pulsing red alert:

In addition to this, the status will automatically be displayed on the Health tile of your default Workspace dashboard.

Creating our KPI

Now that we have our Monitor, creating a KPI from it is a breeze. We just need to edit our tile and this time click on the KPI tab. We are going to call our KPI ‘P1 Incidents’ and then assign it the Incident Responses Type that we created earlier:

Once we click on Save, we can really see the dynamism and interconnectedness of SquaredUp dashboards in action. At the level of our IT Team dashboard we can see that our P1 Incidents metric now displays a KPI icon:

The KPI will also be featured in the default dashboard for the Team Workspace. If we then traverse to the top level of the hierarchy, we can see that our KPI’s have automatically bubbled up to our Organization view, enabling us to compare performance across business units at a glance:

This is a great example of the power of SquaredUp. Your dashboard is not a static image. Instead, it is always connected to its underlying context and these contexts can be cascaded upwards to enable enormously powerful visualizations encapsulating multiple points across an organization's graph.

Let us know what you think!

This is the initial iteration of our KPI roll-up feature. It is a feature that is under active development, and we welcome your feedback as we extend and refine this functionality. We know some customers would like to have a historical view of their KPIs and this is already on our To-Do list. We’d love to hear about your use cases and your thoughts on how SquaredUp can best give visibility to the KPIs used in your own organisation