Track an operational KPI
What this achieves
Section titled “What this achieves”An operational KPI is a metric you watch continuously rather than a target you complete. It is rated against fixed red, amber, and green bands and updated by recorded readings, so its status reflects the latest measurement.
Required role: Administrator or Manager.
A KPI is not a goal
Section titled “A KPI is not a goal”The two are genuinely different things, and the distinction is worth settling before you create either.
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Operational KPI | A live health gauge. Fixed red, amber, and green bands, updated by recorded readings. It never completes. |
| Goal or OKR | A target for a period. Tracks target against current and rolls up the alignment cascade. It completes. |
Example: “keep incidents under an agreed threshold” is a KPI for HC Corp UK Ltd — it is either green or it is not, every month, forever. “Reduce incidents by a set amount this quarter” is a goal, and it finishes.
Choosing wrongly produces either a goal nobody ever closes or a KPI that disappears once it is met.
- Go to Performance → KPIs.
- Create a new KPI.
- Name it and set its Category.
- Set the direction — whether higher or lower is better.
- Set the measurement frequency.
- Define the red, amber, and green bands.
- Save, then record readings as they become available.
Category
Section titled “Category”| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Financial | Money measures. |
| Customer | Customer-facing measures. |
| Operational / Process | How the work runs. |
| Learning & Growth | Capability measures. |
| People / HR | Workforce measures. |
| Compliance | Regulatory and policy measures. |
Categories are what let a leadership view group metrics rather than present a flat list, so set one deliberately.
Direction
Section titled “Direction”| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Higher is better | A rising value is an improvement. |
| Lower is better | A falling value is an improvement. |
Direction decides how the bands are read. Getting it wrong inverts the status, so a metric that is doing well shows red.
Example: at HC Corp UK Ltd, a satisfaction measure is higher-is-better and an incident count is lower-is-better. The same numeric bands would mean opposite things.
Frequency
Section titled “Frequency”Readings can be daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual. Match the frequency to how often the measurement genuinely changes and to how often someone will actually record it.
A daily KPI nobody updates daily reads as stale rather than green, and an annual one moves too slowly to act on.
Red, amber, green
Section titled “Red, amber, green”Status comes from the bands rather than from a judgement. Set the thresholds so amber is a genuine warning band and not a place where metrics live permanently.
An amber that everything sits in tells you nothing. If most of your KPIs are amber most of the time, the bands are wrong rather than the business.
Readings
Section titled “Readings”A KPI’s status is updated by recorded readings, and its history builds a trend. Where no reading exists, the KPI shows as unmeasured — which is different from being green and worth chasing rather than ignoring.
Example: an HC Corp UK Ltd KPI showing unmeasured means nobody has recorded a value, not that the metric is healthy.
What happens next
Section titled “What happens next”KPIs feed the leadership view where they are read as a set rather than individually, and a weighted KPI plan can contribute to an appraisal in the same way a weighted goal plan does — producing a score that suggests a rating without setting one. Where a KPI sits alongside a goal plan but is not driving the appraisal, the review screen says so.
Related
Section titled “Related”© 2025-2026 Humavera Documentation - BPilot Ltd. All Rights Reserved