ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the great usefulness of key performance indicators (KPIs) to target both project and business value generation; indeed, although KPIs are fundamental measures of released projects/products/services, KPI-based measures and estimations can be also extremely useful to get crucial progress indications about the generated value and to monitor stakeholder expectations, during investment, project, and product/service life cycles. In fact, since project stakeholders are diverse, have different behavior and expectations, and, indeed, target different types of value, a variety of KPIs can be effectively used to measure and/or estimate delivered value, economic value, and perceived business value. Several examples of KPIs are then proposed, including project management KPIs (e.g., earned value, etc.), economic KPIs (e.g., ROI, etc.), business value KPIs that are either common in different sectors (e.g., measures of stakeholder satisfaction, of reputation, etc.), or specific. Definitively, proper KPIs can be selected, agreed, measured/estimated, shared with stakeholders via dashboards, and used to confirm/readdress, in terms of both deliverables and stakeholder satisfaction, the action of the project team during the entire project life cycle, then increasing the success rate of both complicated and complex projects.
