Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Bible

Implementing KPIs from SharePoint Lists

Creating KPIs from data in SharePoint lists is an easy way to summarize the status collected in the wealth of valuable data around your organization, and to drive people to update the status of their items. However, the fact that there is a wealth of information in SharePoint can make the indicator hard to define.

When you create a KPI from a SharePoint list, you combine a view of the list with calculations performed on a column or columns. This combines the SharePoint flexibility of creating a view for all the pertinent items with the KPI ability to calculate and compare a value against a goal and display that result to drive action.

Cross-Ref

See Chapter 4 for details on how to create metadata, custom lists, and views that can then be used in a KPI based on SharePoint data.

For example, you can create a KPI that turns red if ten percent or more of active tasks in a Tasks list are past due and not complete. To do this, you create a view for tasks where status does not equal complete. Next, define a KPI based on that list that calculates the percentage of items where the value of the due date column is less than the current date, and the value of the % complete column is not equal to 100. Then proceed to set the success level to be 5% or below and the warning level to be when this percentage is between 6% and 10%. The stop sign would then appear for anything above 10%.

The process for planning a KPI from a SharePoint list has three steps: ...