Evaluation Indicators: A Guide for Professionals
Would you like to know if your training programmes are on the right track? Using reliable evaluation indicators is crucial to measure a project's effectiveness. To avoid failure, it is essential to integrate rigorous monitoring indicators. Without these measures, you risk managing your project without clear visibility, leading to frustration, loss of time or resources, and potentially the trust of stakeholders. Often, due to a lack of time, resources, project management skills, or simple negligence, many projects are launched without adequate monitoring indicators. This article offers some advice, examples, and tools to select the most relevant evaluation indicators to optimise your project's effectiveness.
What are project evaluation indicators?
An evaluation indicator, also known as a key performance indicator or KPI, is an indispensable tool for measuring a project's effectiveness or ensuring training follow-up. It provides a concrete measure of performance, allowing the project manager to make better decisions.
In other words, monitoring indicators measure the relevance of a project and are also an excellent way to evaluate training. Evaluation indicators are useful tools that measure and track progress against set objectives. They also detect potential deviations so you can make more informed decisions. For example, if you want to launch impactful training within a company, monitoring indicators will ensure the project's success.
What are the different types of evaluation indicators?
Even though there are many types of indicators, and they should suit your professional sector, company, and project, they can generally be grouped into four main categories:
- Cost indicators: They check that the project does not exceed the set budget. They are essential for ensuring the project's profitability and the organisation's financial health.
- Time indicators: These indicators ensure that the project is completed within the scheduled time frame. Meeting deadlines is usually as important as the quality of the services provided.
- Quality indicators: They assess whether the work performed meets the established requirements. Measuring quality with these indicators is essential to directly reflect the project's value.
- Efficiency indicators: These indicators measure whether the use of various resources (financial, human, time, etc.) is optimal or not.
How to define effective evaluation indicators?
To define relevant evaluation indicators that assess progress and identify gaps related to objectives, you can follow these principles:
- Achievable: Set realistic goals.
- Connected: Ensure all indicators are linked to a specific project objective.
- Quantifiable: Implement measurable indicators.
- Defined: Indicators should have an established timeframe and be temporal to enable relevant tracking.
- Simple: Create understandable, clear, and transparent indicators for all collaborators.
- Decision-based: Select indicators that simplify decision-making.
- Custom-made: Indicators should be tailored to meet the needs of the project and collaborators.
To determine effective evaluation indicators, you can rely on a personalised solution, for example, for training.
How to analyse project performance?
To measure a project's performance, you can design a dashboard to facilitate monitoring the effectiveness of the actions taken. This works similarly to a training booklet for evaluating and tracking training. If you operate in project portfolio mode, a project portfolio management software can help. However, creating a project performance dashboard requires prior organisation. You need to choose suitable indicators, collect data regularly, analyse results, and communicate effectively with all concerned parties.
Before creating a performance dashboard, consider its purpose. Which collaborators are concerned with the dashboard? Will it be used for operational or strategic monitoring? What evaluation indicators are useful? How will you assess the return on investment? How will you share the results? Below, we provide several tips for designing your dashboard.
Define the stakeholders
It is crucial to anticipate the communication of results from the start. A performance dashboard primarily makes it easier to analyse and communicate results.
Establish performance objectives
Identify the objectives you want to analyse to measure the project's performance. Evaluation criteria are often based on costs, timelines, yield, and quality. Then, define the completion percentages and gaps from the set objectives.
Set targets
For each indicator, measure the situation at the project's start and what you expect at the end. The values obtained will help establish success criteria. Thus, you can measure if the project's results meet the requirements or if corrective measures are needed.
Organise data
For effective management of evaluation indicators, creating a dashboard is recommended. This dashboard should highlight each indicator, allowing for systematic filling with concrete data. It is wise to include calculation formulas to evaluate gaps from predefined objectives. This ensures precise and facilitated performance analysis.
Communicate results
The final step involves transforming collected data into visual representations, such as graphs. This process aims to effectively communicate the results to project stakeholders. It is essential that this data is presented clearly and intelligibly, ensuring optimal understanding and informed decision-making.
