The Essential Key Performance Indicators for Program Management

These KPIs focus on how your program is improving your organization’s overall capabilities. They are similar to operational KPIs, but focus more on the strategic value and goals of your organization. 

• The “Health” of Your Teams: Always monitor and assess how well your teams are working together. You’ll also want to assess how aligned their work is with the mission of the organization, how committed they are to the organization’s core principles, and a range of similar ideas and metrics.
  
  Some of these things might seem difficult to measure quantitatively, but it’s possible.“[Measuring these items] can come through in surveys,” says Carroll. “I usually try to facilitate a session around it and gather some sort of voting system around a lot of different touchpoints.”
  
  Carroll says that companies can use employee surveys to determine a quantitative score on these factors. They can learn, for instance, “Hey, we scored a 43 in feeling connected to the core company mission,” he says.
  
  If surveys reveal low scores, Carroll says, “You could actually make a case that the majority of our frontline workers, or individual contributors, actually aren't connected to our corporate mission at all. So, maybe we should develop some sort of internal program, something that covers corporate values, or some sort of learning and development program, something that actually connects people to the corporate mission. That depends on your company’s ability to take qualitative ideas and turn them into quantitative data.”
  
  You can download free team health cards below to get started.
• Expected Program Benefits vs. Actual: While you’ll track specific metrics on how the program is doing, the program charter or management plan will set out some primary goals and expectations of benefits from the program that you will always be tracking. (You can download a template for a program charter in our roundup of program management templates.) Periodically, you should also monitor actual results — compared to the goals — in some of those primary areas, and make adjustments when needed.
• Speed to Learning: Speed to learning is about how quickly your company can understand how customers are reacting to a product or service, and how quickly you can adjust.
  
  Carroll says that the term speed to learning is especially applicable to software development and to the software as a service industry. But it can still be a worthwhile concept and KPI in many industries.
  
  “As a company, how quickly can you learn something, whether it's about your customer or the effectiveness of [a product] feature?” Carroll asks. “How can we validate that people actually want to pay for this membership or this feature? Even a company that builds bikes — are you going to build an entire bike with all the features that you want on it before you figure out if your customer actually wants it? Probably not. If you could actually take a bike that already exists and modify it to add some of the features that you want, and then go out and user-test it, you may turn a speed to learning that was three months down to three days. Now, you learned something about your customer. You distill, reflect on, and analyze it, and then you can act upon it. And then, build it into the new iteration of your next product.
  
  “It’s like, ‘We have a hypothesis, how quickly can we actually get an answer to this hypothesis?’” he says.
  
  The way you can turn that knowledge into a KPI is to actually track some valuable learnings about customer reaction to your product and how many of them you learn over a set period, Carroll says.
  
  You can find a free, downloadable infographic on speed to learning, with examples, below.
• Time to Make Decisions: You can and should track how long it takes your program teams, or your company, to make important decisions relating to a program. Quicker isn’t always better, of course. But, your company will be able to track when the metric shows that important decisions are taking too long for your company to be nimble and effective.
• Internal Customer Satisfaction: External customer satisfaction is vital, but it’s not the only thing you should be tracking. Your program will have a number of key stakeholders. Some may be outside the company; many will be leaders and important players within your company. Your program can and should track their satisfaction in a number of ways. That might be through simple surveys, or it could be through tracking the number of questions or complaints from stakeholders. It will tell you how successful the program is or whether it quickly needs to make changes.