How to Craft Clear and Achievable KPIs for IT Teams
When it comes to managing IT teams, it can be challenging to know if they're prioritizing the right projects. IT folks get up to some pretty technical and complicated stuff. How can you determine that what they're spending their time on is best for the organization? That's where Key Performance Indicators, AKA KPIs for IT teams come in.
In this guide, we're breaking down why KPIs for IT are so essential and exploring what makes good KPIs that truly capture your team's performance. Whether you’re aiming to improve system uptime, security, or team training, read on to find practical advice to set your IT team up for success.
What are KPIs for IT?
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. Here’s the simplest definition: KPIs are any specific measurement of success. KPIs are used across businesses—not just Information Technology (IT)—to track whether you're reaching your goals. They’re like a scoreboard showing if things are going the way they should.
KPIs for IT are specific measurements that highlight how well the IT department keeps networks and computers running, how quickly user issues are resolved, or the rate at which software is developed.
Different KPIs are set for each project and team, so KPIs for the IT department will look different from KPIs for the sales department. Say your company set a goal to earn $100,000 in sales this month. At the end of every day, you compare how much money has been made in sales to that $100,000 number. However, sales numbers aren't great KPIs for the IT department since they don't sell anything!
Each organization's IT department's KPIs will be unique, but they follow a pattern. IT KPIs measure things like how quickly issues are fixed, how often systems are running, and how often projects are completed on time.
Why are KPIs for IT so Important?
Good KPIs for IT come with many benefits:
Better Performance: IT teams working toward shared goals are more productive and efficient.
Better Decision-Making: Team leads can make quicker, more informed decisions with the data-driven insights they get from KPIs.
Accountability: IT teams are empowered and feel a sense of responsibility and ownership for their KPI-powered goals.
Alignment: When clear KPIs direct their actions, IT teams can support companies more effectively, leading to greater productivity and profits.
KPIs for IT teams also help contextualize and explain their accomplishments to stakeholders and management. IT operations can be challenging for a layperson to understand, so translating the success of the IT team is valuable when comparing them to departments whose success or failure is listed in widgets produced or dollars earned.
There is one drawback—if you write too few KPIs or bad KPIs, you can distort behavior. Remember: You get more of what you measure. In other words, when a metric gets tracked, employees focus their efforts on improving it – especially if it's tied to promotions or evaluations. On the one hand, this can drive performance. Still, it can come with unintended consequences, like neglecting unmeasured but equally important tasks, cutting corners, or even gaming the system to achieve targets.
KPIs for IT vs OKR, SLA, and Other Measurements
KPIs aren’t the only game in town when it comes to three-letter abbreviations for measuring business goals. OKR (Objectives and Key Results) and SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are similar concepts that people sometimes confuse with KPIs.
OKRs name a big goal and lay out the steps needed to reach it. They focus on what a specific team aims to achieve. KPIs, on the other hand, measure specific outcomes tied to the goals in the OKR. KPIs are often the measurable results that show whether or not OKRs are being met.
SLAs are formal agreements that define the service an IT team is committed to delivering, usually service availability or network uptime. KPIs help monitor service levels and use measurable data to confirm the status of the SLA goals (for example, high availability uptime). SLAs need KPIs to track and prove compliance, but they’re different tools.
Even trained managers can find all the abbreviations and concepts confusing. Remember: key performance indicators are specific benchmarks for tracking success. In IT, they're usually related to IT systems, networks, cybersecurity, or development.
How to Craft Good KPIs for IT Teams
A good KPI should be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, time-bound, or SMART. Writing SMART goals is one of the oldest rules in business for a reason—it works. Writing balanced KPIs for IT operations means capturing the whole picture of your IT team’s work.
Here are the steps for writing good KPIs for IT teams:
Learn Their Capabilities: Get a deep understanding of the IT team’s technical capabilities and responsibilities.
Name Top-Level Goals: Define the big picture the IT team should be aiming toward (e.g., improving uptime or enhancing security).
Choose Relevant Metrics: Identify tangible and measurable metrics that are directly related to the goals (e.g., uptime percentage or incident detection time).
Set Clear Targets: List specific, achievable, and time-bound targets for each metric (e.g., 99.9% system uptime or 30-minute average incident detection).
Ensure Alignment: Compare your IT KPIs against organizational objectives and make sure they support the company and prioritize the right goals (e.g., don’t emphasize maintaining a software package that no one uses).
Monitor and Adjust: Include the IT team in tracking the KPIs, reviewing the progress, and determining whether they’re measuring the appropriate successes.
Crafting KPIs for IT teams can be a challenge. Work with team leaders and company leadership to focus on what metrics really matter and how you can support company goals as a whole. Using a collaborative approach will ensure your metrics are valuable and can be measured accurately.
How to Write Bad KPIs for IT Teams
Tolstoy wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Bad KPIs for IT are the same way: there are as many ways to write a bad KPI as there are IT teams.
Here are a few pitfalls to watch out for when crafting metrics to track:
Too Vague: KPIs that lack specificity lead to confusion and frustration.
Unmeasurable: Metrics that can’t be tracked can’t be achieved.
Unrealistic: KPIs that are impossible to achieve make people feel ignored, and like their work doesn’t matter.
Irrelevant to Objectives: Metrics aren’t aligned with business goals and waste time, energy, and resources.
Overly Complex: Measuring too many variables can lead to competing or conflicting objectives.
No Time Frame: KPIs without a deadline will constantly be pushed back by more pressing matters.
To make good KPIs for IT departments, we want to make them specific, actionable, and bound by time. But doing it right can take time, and bad KPIs are easy to make. Imagine the following were KPIs for your IT team – spot what makes them bad:
Improve system performance to ensure a better user experience across all platforms.
Reduce incidents to maintain a smoother workflow and avoid disruptions in the organization.
Increase user satisfaction by providing more responsive support and better solutions.
Complete projects faster to enhance overall productivity and meet organizational goals more efficiently.
Good Example KPIs for IT teams
Let's look at a few good examples of KPIs for IT. Teams can have KPIs in many different categories, according to what they need to accomplish. We've broken these into several categories.
Examples of infrastructure and operations KPIs for IT:
Maintain 99.9% network uptime monthly.
Achieve a Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) of under 4 hours.
Reduce unplanned downtime to less than 1 hour per quarter.
Examples of security and compliance KPIs:
Respond to 100% of critical security incidents within 15 minutes.
Patch 95% of systems within 30 days of a patch release.
Achieve a 30-minute average incident detection time.
Examples of training and development KPIs for IT departments:
Increase the number of team members with advanced cloud certifications by 20% in the next 12 months.
Maintain 3 hours/week toward certification training for all IT staff.
Track 20 hours of upkeep training per quarter from all IT staff.
Examples of software development KPIs:
Maintain a velocity (story points or tasks) of 20-30 points per 2-week sprint.
Achieve less than 1 bug per 1,000 lines of code.
Increase deployment frequency to once per week.
Tools for Tracking KPIs for IT
When selecting a KPI tracking tool, consider factors such as ease of use, integration capabilities with existing systems, customization options, and the specific KPIs relevant to your IT team's objectives. The right tool should give you visibility into performance metrics and streamline reporting processes.
Depending on your team and your metrics, tools for tracking IT KPIs might include:
ClickUp: Project management tool that includes great KPI tracking features and task management.
Jira: Features customizable dashboards, built-in reports, and integrations with other tools. These can help teams monitor performance metrics and optimize workflow efficiency.
Power BI: Provides interactive visualizations that offer insights into KPIs through real-time data integration and customizable reports.
Most task management platforms offer some level of KPI training, so look into the features of the tools you already use.
Training and certification are crucial in IT. Establishing KPIs for these in a Learning Management System (LMS) helps monitor progress, identify skill gaps, ensure training completion, and measure their impact on team performance.
Integrating your training pipeline with the CBT Nuggets LMS is the most versatile way for your team to train and the easiest way to keep tracking and reporting across training providers in one place.
Final Thoughts
KPIs for IT keep your teams focused and working toward organizational priorities. They help ensure employees get promoted and rewarded for doing the work that the organization values most.
Even better, KPIs help explain the technical, wonky work of IT folks to management and leadership. When you track the right things, you get more of what you want most – and that keeps everyone happy.
Learn more about how CBT Nuggets LMS can help your team prioritize training and grow their knowledge.
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