Always Scrutinize Legacy KPIs and Processes

What are Legacy KPIs?

Let’s start by explaining key performance indicators (KPIs) so we can set a baseline. KPIs are what businesses use to measure their performance, typically across time but they can also be used for one-time analysis. There’s a semi-common turn of phrase in the professional world that states “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. If you don’t have visibility into how your actions can positively or negatively impact a certain KPI there is no way to systematically improve it. As such, these key performance indicators serve as a centerpiece for organizations to make decisions about how to change course or how to make revenue generating improvements (ideally).

Legacy KPIs specifically are KPIs that are old. Now what do I mean by old? There’s a little wiggle room in the interpretation because it depends on the speed of your businesses transitions and the speed of market / customer changes. For an average internet-based business anything that was initially conceived more than 2 years ago could be considered legacy. You might be saying “what!? 2 years is so short”. It is, I agree with you; on the flip side the world that many businesses exist in can change dramatically in two years. Think about any of the annual review cycles you’ve experienced. How often are the goals that are set at the beginning of the year the same as the true focus of the company at the end of the year? Rarely, if ever, right? If the priorities for your own role shift enough within a year it should make sense that company level measurement might also get stale after 2 years.

How to Adapt KPIs in a Changing World

There are two main levels of adapting and re-assessing legacy measurement practices. The first and most obvious version for most people on a day-to-day basis is whether your KPIs capture your current business objectives. By that I mean if your company is leaning more into engagement on a specific section or vertical of your business your metric prioritization should reflect that. If you’re a legacy e-commerce platform and your growth has plateaued it might make sense to start incorporating more KPIs about your email list churn rate or your re-marketing channels. In summary, make sure you’re tracking KPIs that align with your current business goals.

The second level of adapting is re-evaluating the way that your existing metrics are calculated if those metrics meet the criteria of “this is relevant to my current business goals”. Companies rarely ever implement metrics perfectly the first time. Frequently, things are left half implemented or implemented in a workaround way where what is being measured isn’t the thing that business directly cares about. As an example, imagine your organization is a publisher for advertisements and is therefore interested in the number of ad impressions on specific types of pages. Maybe tracking the number of impressions on a given page wasn’t possible when the need first arose so instead of tracking impressions your business decided that tracking page views and generating additional synthetic page views when a user scrolled would allow the business to measure something that approximates ad impressions. It is all too easy for the business to keep using this subpar measurement methodology because “that’s how it’s always been” when what that company should really do is assess whether it’s possible to track their goal the correct way either merging data in a data warehouse between the frontend data analytics and the backend ad impressions data or just tracking impressions in the web analytics implementation itself.

What About Legacy Processes?

Just like a legacy KPI, a legacy process is a process that is 2 years or older and due for some scrutiny. Many times, companies keep doing processes because they have become blind to them. If you're over exposed to an advertisement you stop noticing them, if you're exposed to a silly process and told to just keep doing it you eventually forget to even think about the process. At least once per year (or more often if possible) someone should be asking “is there a better way to accomplish this same goal?” about each of your processes. This regular scrutiny helps to clean out the bad processes that otherwise might live on for much too long. Each bad process might only make your company 2% less efficient but if you have enough of them stacking up, they can compound into huge inefficiency.

Takeaways

1. Make sure your KPIs focus on your organization's area of growth. Spend less time on old metrics that matter less or may be vanity metrics.
2. Make sure you think critically about each of your metrics and processes at least once per year. Ask “why is it done this way or why is it useful?”