The KPI Institute

Recently, I got my certification with The KPI Institute. My general feedback is that the course and certification is well worth the investment. Even if you have to take this money out of your pocket, I would still suggest it to anyone that is already or going to be in the BI or Strategy field.

So what does the topics cover? The certification course I took is called “KPI Professional”. It’s a three days course and trains you how to establish and work with KPIs. Well, if you’re already in this field, you would still want to take the course. Why? It’s simply because it gives the theory behind with historical and logical evidence on how it works. I’m pretty sure in the end, you’ll understand everything from the roots. Moreover, the course has enormous resources on KPIs and theories. Actually, without any experience, I think you might not gain as much but I still highly recommend it.

The GOOD!

Well, like I said, the good part of the course is that it starts at a beginners course and moves towards an extremely professional approach. On the final day, it all comes together like puzzles. You will understand all the basics, workflow, definitions, best practices as well as getting proof of concept templates. On top of these, you will also have hands-on experience on developing KPIs and large amount of resources including but not limited to proof of concepts and templates. To be honest, I haven’t gone through all the resources yet since it’ll take me days if not weeks.

In the course description it mentions the key benefits as follows:

Key Business Benefits

• Have a clear understanding of the KPI management challenges and how to address them;
• Facilitate the KPI selection process and establishment of scorecards and dashboards at a functional and organisational level;
• Choose the right tools from the KPI management toolkit to maximise the impact of performance management in practice;
• Deploy and promote good practice in KPI activation, reporting and visualisation;
• Provide advice and coach colleagues on the rigorous approach to establish and use KPIs.

After the course, I would be surprised if you say you didn’t get more out of it. As during the course, case studies were provided and hands-on experience was also a key factor to success.

Other reasons for attending the course:

Reasons for attending this course (source from KPI Institute)

	s of performance management system implementations informing the course content
	hours of technical training, complemented by over 2 hours of interactive discussions
	key concepts clarified
	insights into implementing and using KPIs smartly
	templates to support deployment of course learning
	years of experience in performance management synthesized in the course material
	smartKPIs explored in detail
	interactive exercises and group activities
	quick reference guides
	months of free access to the http://www.smartKPIs.com premium content.

 

The BAD

I actually don’t think there is any bad in the course. The only thing I suggest is that they could have a more extensive data visualization library. It didn’t cover marrimeko, geospatial, pareto, gannt, funnel, pyramid, heat map, candlestick, multilevel pie chart, step line, kagi, error, box and whisker as well as log charts… I’m sure there’s more but these might be the popular ones to cover. Having that said, Aurel (the CEO and the instructor), gave us a link to a visualization poster which is from HiChert. Apparently, it’s a well known organization for visual analytics. Now, that’s something extremely interesting. Here’s the link to hichert.

This poster gives all the best practices everyone should have when implementing visuals. I used all since I think it’s already too much. It’s more than enough rules to follow.

Conclusion

If I was to give a pointing system to this, I would simply have 7 areas to cover.

Instructor: 10/10

Course Material: 10/10

Topics Covered In Depth: 8/10

Case Study Experience: 8/10

Hands-On Experience: 10/10

Real Life Experience: 10/10

Other Resources: 10/10

So the scores from myself actually tells if this is well worth attending. Though I think another day would go into more depth which is need for me in particular. But I think the right thing to do is actually split it into another advanced course which they do provide. Do I agree with the theories with my real life experience? I would say 99% of it, I would agree. This is especially important because majority of the time, theory and real life scenarios are disconnected!

I would also add a specific SMART criteria for everyone, for those that don’t know:

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Relevant

Timely (Timed/Time-based)

 In wiki, they have SMARTER.

Evaluate

Re-evaluate