Assessing 2021 KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are critical to help us understand how our business is performing.

As we begin 2022 and become excited and enthusiastic about all future opportunities and challenges we look forward to this year, we need to pause and reflect on the year that has passed and consider how successful we were in 2021.

Failing to understand the positive and negatives of 2021 can lead us to repeat the same mistakes, missed opportunities and fail to achieve our business and personal goals for the current year.

So, what do your key performance indicators (KPIs’) look like for 2021?

Did you plan at the start of the year what you were going to achieve?  

Where SMART objectives? 

We need to set goals for our business every year not simply at the start of our business when we create a business plan.  We also need to make sure that these KPIs are balanced and not simply focused on one element of the business that we know we are comfortable with.

Understanding how your business is performing is more than just looking at cash in the bank (although this is probably the most important).

When we think about our KPIs from a Business Analytics point of view, we want to make sure we have clear KPIs defined.  We also have to make sure we have the information available to help us measure the success or lack of success we are having with these KPIs.  If you are looking back to last year and feel that you don’t have all the information you need to measure or make an assessment on your 2021 KPIs, now is the perfect opportunity to address this for 2022.  Not only is it important to set your 2022 goals now, but make sure you are capturing the information needed to measure these through the year.

For many, this may not the most exciting activity to be getting on with right now.  I’m sure catching up on emails, networking, speaking to customers, building relationships with leads and opportunities is far more exciting.

However, this is the best time of the year to start as you mean to go on!

Learn from the mistakes and missed opportunities for 2021 and hit the ground running with 2022.

KPIs as part of a Balanced Business Scorecards

One of the best ways to ensure that your objectives for the year are giving a proper perspective on our businesses performance, it to set create a broad range across more than one area of your business.  Following a Balanced Scorecard framework can support you with this and force you to create relevant business goals are right for your business but are also balanced.

The below example was create using Microsoft Power BI, meaning that the key business metrics cab be easily accessed and shared with anybody in the business. You can read more about how Power BI can help you business check out another one of our Power BI for Small Business blog or Microsoft Power BI services offered by Appsure IT.

If you want to try Microsoft Power BI yourself for free simply go to the Microsoft Power BI site and get started.

Creating Objectives is not always an easy thing to do and will require you to thing strategically about success looks like and what objectives can help you assess that. To help you with some ideas we have listed some simply examples that should help you focus your attention. This list is not conclusive and not all will be required for your business.

Examples KPIs

Finance Outlook Business KPIs

Customer Perspective Business KPIs

Internal Process Perspective Business KPIs

Learning and Growth Perspective Business KPIs

How angry feel when you buy something, and it doesn’t do what you thought it would? Ideally, we should be looking to return our purchase and get our money back, right! Would you do the same with Failed IT Projects?

If we’ve invested weeks or months of our time and effort as well as our money to get something that will have a positive change for our business. It now becomes a more complicated decision. The idea of going back to where we were, rendering all the time and money is simply unthinkable for many. So, we must compromise and accept some steps forward but ultimately, we have not achieved what we set out to achieve.

For so many people in business, this is their experience of IT Projects and implementing IT Systems. Business owners have invested time, effort and money and are left feeling disappointed, frustrated and angry with results.

If we were to pause and think about what we did wrong, it would likely make us feel very uncomfortable and angry, but we must learn from our mistakes. While it’s easy to point the finger at the IT application not doing what it’s supposed to do, this may be unfair. It’s unlikely that the application changed what it does during an implementation. It’s far more realistic to conclude that the application was never going to deliver the benefit that we had originally indented.

• How did you capture and communicate these benefits?
• What problems did you need to be solved?
• How did we communicate this internally and externally?
• What evidence where you given to ensure this was achievable?
• What assurance and controls did you put in place to make sure that it happened?

It’s not always pleasant reflecting on mistakes we may have made, but if you are not able to answer these crucial questions when looking back at a bad experience with failed IT projects, you need to own some of the blame and find a way to move forward.

All of the above questions are centred on activities that should be dealt with early on within the project. Making the project or new IT system will solve the problems or exploit the opportunities that we want them to before we start spending money. Making it clear to all stakeholders what you expect and put in place controls so that any deviations are dealt with early and don’t derail the expected benefits.

Hopefully the questions above can give you a few opportunities to think about you will want to do things differently going forward. We can’t stop moving forward or simply give up! Just because you’ve had a bad experience with failed IT projects, there will be problem and opportunities within your business that IT can provide you with some great ways to advance your business. Learning from previous projects, whether positive or negative experience will put you in a good position to create positive results with the next project.

Get it right at the beginning and you are on the right path!

There are two roles or skills sets that play a key role in delivering successful IT projects. Project Management and Business Analysis roles should work together to outline what any IT project is to deliver and how that will achieved the desired business benefits. The Business Analyst role can work as a Requirements Engineer to capture everything that the IT Solution needs to deliver, linking this to the overall business benefits that the project must deliver. The Project Manager role will make sure that any supplier can first of all demonstrate their ability to meet the requirements and also put in place a number of control measures to hold all project team members (including third party providers) to account. The project team can work within agreed tolerance, but any deviations are expedited straight away. This allows corrective actions to be agreed and implemented, ensuring no nasty surprises as left until the end of the project.

If you are planning on running your own IT project, there are many great resource available including those at the PRINCE2 Resources site. However, these type of services and support is available from Appsure IT for any size of IT project.

You can read more about the importance of good Business Analysis and Project Management in the Appsure IT Services pages.

IT Strategy is key for businesses of all sizes.

One of the first things I did when starting up my own business, was to create a marketing strategy and a business development strategy. These strategies are crucial as they give you direction on how to create and advertise the brand that represents your company; then gives consideration on how to turn that brand awareness into leads and opportunities, that will eventually lead to paying work.

The next major milestone is to start delivering on whatever your business does. Whatever it is that you set out to do, just roll up your sleeves and start performing. Looks like you ended up in the world of spreadsheets, never to return!

Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are great for getting things started, forming ideas, capturing ad hoc information and performing analysis, but what is the plan for these as your business grows?

You may already be in a place where you have multiple spreadsheets containing critical information, partially duplicated. You are probably spending an unreasonable amount of time updating all these spreadsheets just to keep everything going.

Maybe you already have applications that you have been using for years that have served your business well, but is that still the case and what is the next step when these outlive their purpose?

It can seem daunting to create a strategy for IT and your applications; however, this is something that you can do yourself without having to become an IT strategist.

Strategies need to be aligned to a business objective, so you will need to consider how IT supports your business and how it will be measured. Once you have that objective, pulling together a list of questions like the sample below should help you identify your preferences. These preferences can then be used to create a strategy that is right for your business.

Sample questions to help form an application strategy:

• Should your application be in the Cloud or will they be set up On-Premise?
• If your documents are to be stored in the Cloud, what provider are you going to use? i.e. Microsoft or Google etc.
• Do you prefer to use applications that are open source or do you prefer to work with suppliers with proprietary software?
• Will the applications be supported by internal employees or will the support be outsourced to a third party?
• Do you intend to develop applications, or should it be configured, or is a mix of both acceptable to you?
• Will you have dedicated applications for specific functions or one enterprise-wide application to support the whole business?

While these questions are very generic and basic they give you a starting point about some topics to think about. 

Having given some considerations to some of the tactical questions listed above, you should be able to start forming this into a strategy that will support your decision-making process going forward.

Your IT strategies should give you the direction to look at any business problems you may have, then make an assessment on what action needs to be taken.

As an example, you may have made some decisions on Cloud hosted Microsoft applications. This will give a clear direction to look at the Microsoft app store or approach a Microsoft reseller. The need to review all the platform types and suppliers every time has been removed, allowing a quicker and consistent approach to IT investment. This will remove some of the burdens and allowing you to get back to other aspects of your business.

There are many other aspects to consider when going deeper into IT and Digital strategies however, it is important that organisations of all types and sizes, give at least some consideration to their IT needs.

Failing to do so now, is simply creating future problems, that are likely harder to deal with!

I think we all love to get something for nothing.

I use several free versions of applications, which are easy to use and generally give me enough functionality to get by with. Some I have upgraded to paid versions as they have proven to be very worthwhile, and I wanted to do more with them.

There are far too many free applications to list but I thought I’d share some of my favourite free applications and describe a little bit about what they do.

Zoom – Ok this is a bit of a false start, everybody uses Zoom, but think about how much we rely on this application to keep in contact with the world and how most people still only use the free version.

Grammarly – If like me your brain and fingers are often doing different things when creating online content Grammarly has got you covered. Not only does it check your spelling and grammar errors it also checks the tone of your content to make sure your message is understood clearly.

MailChimp – There are a few apps like MailChimp that can handle your email marketing campaigns. MailChimp does what you’d expect it to do plus it has great integration with other applications.

HubSpot – I can’t talk about free applications without covering the free version of HubSpot. This CRM application will help you filter your leads through to paying customers. The amount of functionality available at no cost almost unbelievable.

Trello – This Kanban-style list application has an almost limitless use. I use Trello for supporting project work. Other than a nice clean interface the main benefit is that I can share it with customers, giving me the ability to assign tasks to people outside my organisation.

MindMeister – Mind mapping software has long been used within the business to support strategic thinking. However, the simplicity and ability to rearrange threads means this application can support any form of problem-solving or exploration.

Canva – Canva is a graphic design platform. It’s great for creating any kind of content to support websites, blogs or social media platform.

Power BI Desktop – This free application from Microsoft has many great uses and can connect to an exhaustive list of applications. It can be a great application for businesses of all sizes but is also great for small business owners. The ability to seamlessly join data from you IT Systems with Excel can provide you with great visibility on what is happening within your business.

So, what are your favourite applications that you use, that you just couldn’t live without?

5 reasons why small business owners should try Microsoft Power BI.

As a small company owner with more than a passing interest in technology, I could not wait to get my hands-on Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform Power BI. With years of experience creating reports and dashboards for others, the idea of being able to generate this kind of content for my business was exciting!

What is stopping you from doing the same? Ok so maybe many years in IT working with data has given me an advantage getting up to speed with this platform however, here are 5 important reasons why I believe that you should be looking to use Power BI in your business regardless of your businesses size.

1. It’s free! Do I need to continue? Yes, you can sign up to the Power BI Portal and download the tools required to model your data and create beautiful reports and dashboard to give you insights into your business. If you want to share these reports and dashboards with others in your organisation you’ll likely need to purchase an additional licence. However, the ability to try out this tool and make it work with your data will not cost you a penny. Taking the time to explore this with your data will give you a real understanding of the capability of the platform and start to provide you with insights into your business.
   
2. The future is here, artificial intelligence (AI) is waiting to give you insights into your products, services, customers, sales or financial data. The AI will interrogate your data and provide you with suggested visualisations, as well as allowing you to ask it questions. It’s not quite the same as asking ‘Alexa’ or ‘Siri’ to give you today’s weather. However, with Power BI’s Q&A functionality you can interact with your company information in a revolutionary way. This is not a gimmick with little real-world use. The AI will genuinely give you different perspectives of your data which will give you true insights into your company not previously available to you!
   
3. A mobile app is available to view your epic reports and dashboards on the move. Although this capability should be expected these days, how many of you can review your businesses KPI’s at the breakfast table or on the move before getting into the office. Knowing where to focus your precious time and what project or customers need your attention is a game-changer when it comes to maximising your ability to influence.
   
4. It supports a huge range of input data sources – including excel. As is common with most of these platforms you can access data from an almost endless number of applications, so the chances are your applications will be easy to connect. However, Power BI has a special trick that sets it apart from its competitors and that is the ability to seamlessly refresh data held in Excel (if it stored on OneDrive). This means you can effectively treat data held in Excel as it if was in one of your applications. This can raise several concerns when we start to think about data governance but also a powerful functionality. The ability to simply patch over gaps in applications and utilise this information in your reporting is very powerful and may allow you to extend your applications without any additional investment.
   
5. The platform is designed as an end-user tool to enable users to take control of their data. It offers an intuitive user experience and the ability to quickly generate insights that add value to you and your organisation. There will likely be some limitations to what you can achieve depending on your data and your initial competency however, with some support this can be overcome.

So, it may not be a tool that is for everybody and there are others on the market but investing a little bit of time to try Microsoft Power BI may just change how you see your business.

Steven discusses why he setup Appsure IT

I have worked for many companies over the past 20 years, covering organisations of various sizes and sectors. Most of these roles have involved working between IT and business users. This has given me great experience joining up business needs with IT capability. This is where my passion for Business Analysis came from.

Combining my passion for Business Analysis along with seeing first-hand the positive effect that it can have on small companies, is why I setup Appsure IT. I feel small companies do not often get the same kind of access to specialist support. I wanted to help them make good decisions about their IT Systems. The pace of change and need to make decisions is probably more relevant to smaller companies as they grow. Processes and applications that used to work well, may become bottlenecks or strained as the organisation and people change.

What is the target Appsure IT client base?

My vision for Appsure IT, is to provide services to Small and Medium sized organisations within the Aberdeen, Scotland and the UK. We offer smaller organisations the ability to explore their problems without any large financial commitment. The client is free to determine the time scale that suits their unique business constraints and demands.

Services Offered

We offer four main service that can be used on their own or in combination with each other. The roles of Business Analyst, Project Manager & Business Analytics Analyst each have their own benefits but are often used to best effect together to focus on the clients end goal.

IT Solutions

We are not limited to any one IT Solution, IT Solution provider or business domain. This means we can assist customers get the most from existing IT systems or help them find suitable alternative IT systems. This offering has a similar approach to the Business Analysis service but it more focused on a particular IT systems rather than a business problem.

The goal and approach to this is still to ensure all the requirements and business requirements are understood, but is many instances primarily in smaller organisations this need to be a must lighter exercise and focus on bring some IT systems to a manual process.

Business Analysis

There are two main areas covered within the Business Analysis service offered by Appsure. IT. The first is focussed on identifying the root cause problem causing the client concern, then working through with them the range of potential opportunities to solve the problem. The client is then able to make informed decisions on how to solve this problem when they are ready to do so. All future steps in the process can be supported by Appsure IT, but it is important that progress is determined by the client readiness to progress.

The second main area within Business Analysis is to support clients looking to purchase or develop applications. In both situations it is critically important to capture, analyse and prioritise requirements to ensure that the client ends up with the application they need, that is aligned to their business.

Other services such as process improvement, workshop facilitation, strategic development and business analysis mentoring are also offered to clients.

Project Management

Our project management approach is tailored to each organisation and project. This ensures the clients expectations are met, while giving due consideration to the project complexity. Appsure IT can perform the project management role for your business for any new or existing project. We can also provide mentoring support for your existing IT project manager. The value of experience should not be overlooked when implementing IT projects!

Business Analytics

Ensuring that information is available to all decision makers within an organisation is critical to business success. Working with the key business users we document requirements; prototype the design and then implement the solution. This can range from basic reports providing simple views of information to high level management dashboards with the ability to drive down into detail as required. By working closely with users and applying Agile techniques we ensure that information is quickly made available to the decision makers, then refined into a suitable format.

My goal is for Appsure IT to have a positive impact on small and medium sized businesses in the Aberdeen, Scotland and UK. By combining Business Analysis investigation skills, good Project Management controls and using Business Analytics to provide business insights; I believe Appsure IT provides their clients a great partnership that supports their business.

If potential clients want to know more about how Appsure IT can help them, we offer a free initial consultation. This will allow a discussion on where the current pain points are and what options are available for working through to a successful conclusion.

If you want to hear more about Appsure IT and how we can support your business simply email contact@appsureit.com or use the below form and we can book a free consultation.