Metrics are quantitative measures used to evaluate performance. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are critical metrics chosen to measure progress towards organizational goals. KPIs can differ between companies and should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Implementing KPIs can be challenging as they require integrating metrics into a company's culture and processes, and managers may not understand limitations. A balanced scorecard approach uses metrics from financial, customer, internal business, and learning/growth perspectives for a more well-rounded evaluation.

1. Performance evaluation samples
If you plan to use metrics as part of your company's performance evaluation system, you
would not have a difficult time looking for metrics examples online.
What exactly are metrics? What makes them indispensable to companies nowadays?
Metrics are actually standard units of measure that are integrated into a system of
performance parameters. These are quantitative in nature and periodically measure a
person, process, institution, or event.
There are hundreds of metrics that managers can use as part of their evaluation systems
of company operations. What is critical for these managers is to choose only those
metrics that are relevant to them. There is a need to dispense of metrics that yield only
useless information to the company. After selecting only the metrics that truly matter, the
chosen measures are then considered as key performance indicators (KPIs) or critical
success factors.
KPIs are defined as metrics, financial or non-financial, that organizations use to define
and measure their performance relative to organizational goals. These KPIs can be
monitored in real-time through business activity monitoring (BAM) or they could be
integrated to the Business Intelligence techniques employed by the company.
KPIs may differ from one company to another, as companies have different aims or goals
as well as business drivers. For example, an educational institution may have different
sets of KPIs from that of retail companies that are more concerned about maintaining
high profit margins.
For business organizations to be able to effectively identify their KPIs, they need to have
pre-defined internal processes and clear performance requirements or goals for each of
these processes. Moreover, business results should be measurable quantitatively or
qualitatively so that they could be compared with performance standards. In addition, the
company should have short-term flexibility in process and resource utilization so that it
becomes relatively easy to implement changes at short notice.
KPIs can be grouped into different categories. Indicators that can be represented as
numbers or numerical figures are called quantitative indicators. KPIs that can be used in
current company processes are called practical indicators. Directional indicators,
meanwhile, determines whether the organization is going in the right direction. Finally,
actionable indicators are those that measure the extent of organizational control to effect
operational changes. KPIs should also follow the SMART criteria. That is, they have to
be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant or result-oriented, and time-bound.

2. While it may seem easy to introduce KPIs in businesses and organizations, this is not the
case in reality. One of the primary obstacles in the use of KPIs is the fact that they can be
expensive, impossible, and difficult to integrate into a company's present culture.
Moreover, many company managers are not aware of the limitations in the use of metrics
in performance evaluations.
In response to such challenges, companies now see the needed wisdom of having a more
balanced perspective through the use of the Balanced Scorecard approach. With this
management concept, companies not only focus on metrics from the financial
perspective, but also on other perspectives, like customer, internal business process, and
learning and growth. There should be several metrics examples for each perspective that
can be obtained from online sources.
http://performanceappraisalebooks.info/ : Over 200 ebooks, templates, forms for
performance appraisal.