Reflect on the following questions. Demonstrate your understanding of the concepts, as well as how these concepts will affect your thinking and practice in the future.

• How do CSFs and KPIs support business decisions?
• How can IT managers leverage CSFs and KPIs? (Your answer should be broader than just making decisions and include advantages such as improving employee motivation.)
• Who should be involved in the process of creating CSFs and KPIs for a large business? What about a small business?
• Should the IT department be consulted before a company finalizes its CSFs and KPIs? How could feedback from an IT manager affect the language of CSFs and KPIs?

How do CSFs and KPIs support business decisions?

As a company with clear goal and directions, they need to have the right people. The reason why the company identifies the tasks and the expected result of that task is for them to know if their goals are realistic. Each department must contribute to the goal, very critical especially if you are in the support side because you are the back bone of the company. And those in field/sales can only deliver if other departments delivered completely. It is indeed necessary to track if your employees are delivering their task 100% for the company to identify TRAINING NEEDS, MOTIVATIONAL ACTIVITIES, PREPAREDNESS to join the goal to grow or if they are really capabale to function the job.

How can IT managers leverage CSFs and KPIs? (Your answer should be broader than just making decisions and include advantages such as improving employee motivation.)

IT Department should know that technology or system can make or break the company. In all the projects, an IT expert must be present to voice out the possiblity of challenge during the creation of the system and it's lead time. After that, should be discussed to the whole team IT Team. Each team member must be assigned to a specific task according to the flow and to motivate, you can call the person "SEGMENT A Master". IT managers can use the CSFs and KPIs to keep the team work together in order to have a succesful system. WEEKLY or AS NEEDED, the manager should coach the members (one-on-one) to know the challenges and praise if he did a good job. it is also through CSFs and KPIs that the manager will be able to identify if you have a team member who is not an expert to the job, maybe lack of experience or lack of opportunity to learn so that the manager can make necessary and timely reshuffles of task within the department.

Who should be involved in the process of creating CSFs and KPIs for a large business? What about a small business?

SMALL BUSINESS

Mostly the owners and shareholders because they are the ones who create goals at the same time, they are mostly with their employees, doing the same thing because of limited budget. Unless you have a full-blown team, you can always include your hired supervisor or manager and the consultant is you have.

LARGE BUSINESS

The department managers proposed CSFs and KPIs after gettinh the direction/goal from the President/General Manager/owner. The department manager identifies the specific task that is enough to deliver the goal. In most cases, the company hires CONSULTANT/EXPERT to facilitate the making of CSFs and KPIs espcially if you aim for wide/huge goal. But you also need to consider consulting other departments because remember you are working as a team.

For example - Sales Department

Daily target: 1 Million

Activities/Promotion: CONSULT Marketing Department

Availability of Stocks: CONSULT Inventory Department

System Readiness: CONSULT IT Department (promotional codes, etc)

Others: Others

Should the IT department be consulted before a company finalizes its CSFs and KPIs? How could feedback from an IT manager affect the language of CSFs and KPIs?

YES. As a matter of fact, there should be a department presentation of CSFs and KPIs before implementing it. Because remember when you are working for the goal, you are not doing it alone, you have other departments helping you. And it will be unfair if one department be given a low performance rating because a certain department failed to deliver it's goal 100%.