Personal Performance Indicators (PPI's)

In a lot of business environments it's all about KPI's. Key Performance Indicators are metrics used to quantify objective to reflect the strategic performance of an organization. I can say a lot about KPI's, but you can read it for yourself on Wikipedia. The only thing about KPI's I want to say is: They need to be SMART (more about SMART).

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Timely

This is all about the business, but what about your own goals? Those goals should also be SMART of course. I would call those Personal Performance Indicators, PPI's.

Every once in a while I should check my Personal Performance Indicators. See if I'm on track. All we would have to specify are the values we want for a colour. For example the following personal goal.

I want to have at least 3 new Microsoft Certifications at the end of year 2007.

So I want to have a green light for a value greater or equal to 3. And an amber light for a value 2 or equal to 3.

Light	Start value	End value
	0	1
	2	2
	3	> 3

In business environments most of the values used for KPI's are calculated making use of Business Intelligence on top of their data. Most personal environments are very different to this. The values we can use for our PPI's most of the time can't be found in any existing system. So we would have to manually change the values. That's not very bad, because we wouldn't have very complex Performance Indicators I guess. But we would also like to have our own dashboard, just like any manager, but now for our PPI's. I'm now thinking about a very simple system you can use to keep track of your PPI's and are able to enter value's for those PPI's. Of course it will make use of the 'traffic light' principle, red, amber and green lights.