Microsoft Sharepoint Services

SharePoint as a business tool can be utilized for displaying data for the end users. And not just displaying the data, but displaying it in brief so that the users get to know the overall scenario without getting down to the basics. For these reasons, I have always liked SharePoint.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is financial and non-financial metrics used to help an organization define and measure progress toward organizational goals. KPIs can be delivered through Business Intelligence techniques to assess the present state of the business and to assist in prescribing a course of action.

Sample KPI list

Consider the following scenario:

You have a company where the performance is based on Surveys that the users provide for the product/company. The Company Director would like the survey data targets to be displayed on the home page of a report site on the SharePoint web application. Now, there are four parameters that need to be displayed on the KPI list.

• Top Area [Overall survey points including all the parameters. The total point are 10 and if the user give a overall survey of equal to or greater than 8 points, then that would be considered under this parameter]
• Bottom Area [This is opposite of Top Area. Now if the end user give a overall score of equal to or less than 4 points, then that would be considered under this parameter]
• Product Quality [This is the individual rating the end user gives about the product that they are using. This is also a score out of 10 points. If the user gives a score of equal to or greater than 8 points then that would be counted positive under this category or else for any value less than 8, it would be considered as negative]
• Engineer Knowledge [This is the individual rating the end user gives based on what they think about the support engineer/executive/customer service agent that they has a talk with. This is also a score out of 10 points. If the user gives a score of equal to or greater than 8 points then that would be counted positive under this category or else for any value less than 8, it would be considered as negative]

The above scenario is just an example so that we can develop out KPI list. The scenario may depend on the company requirement.

e.g. A sales company may want to display the sales that are done for different products in different areas. As per the definition of KPI, it is not necessary that we display only financial data. We can display any data where target is in picture. E.g. if a department want to meet 75% of total product sales in a specific region, we can create a KPI list that can show the current status of the sales as per the data that is present in a SharePoint list / database / external source like XML. In this tutorial, we will first continue with using another SharePoint lists as the data source for generating the KPI list.

So, now that we have an understanding of the scenario, let us get started with the actual work.

• I have created a collaboration portal site which by default creates a “Reports” sub site under the top level site. We can even use a team site or a blank site template to start with. But there might be features that are required for a specific web part to function properly. For these reasons, I tend to start off with a publishing site template and then test it with other templates.
• Browse to the “Reports” site and click on “View All Site Content” in the quick launch bar. Select the Create button in the Actions menu bar.