Building a KPI tree is the first step on a journey to defining the metrics that really matter, because the process identifies levers that can drive your business outcomes, irrespective on any organisational constructs as they are mathematically connected levers.

That challenge these presents is that most businesses will have at least one or two dozen key levers, and it’s not possible to do everything at once (at least not well!). So how does the business prioritise its efforts to focus on the levers that really matter. We need a way to continuously prioritise (and re-prioritise) which of these levers to focus on; both in terms of the desired value we want to achieve and the investment required to move those specific levers.

It’s easy to see how this could then translate into a roadmap of prioritised activities that are based on the desired state of these levers in the tree, and be a powerful planning tool that ensures all actions are aligned to outcomes that contribute to commercial impact. If it isn’t contributing directly to measurable value, or supporting an outcome generating activity, then we should question why we are doing it.

There are many methods through which to establish these types of priorities and they range from simple to very complex. What follows is a simple prioritising matrix method for quickly comparing multiple options to rank them in order of their impact on a desired goal. These are of course hugely complicated when done across many business areas, with weighted priorities and overlapping prioritises and functional areas so please view this as a foundational approach, that can build built upon to become a fully functioning prioritisation system.