Services change. Customer priorities move, delivery responsibilities shift and tools introduce new ways of working. A KPI can continue to appear on the monthly report long after its original purpose needs to be reconsidered.
My thesis places a KPI iteration process alongside relevance and corporate culture. A practical interpretation for service delivery is to treat the measure as something with an owner, a definition and a review decision.
Distinguish reporting from reviewing
Reporting updates the result. Reviewing asks whether the measure, target, source and resulting action remain appropriate. A service may need frequent reporting without changing its definitions frequently. Conversely, a major service transition can justify a definition review before the next routine reporting cycle.
The questionnaire grouped balance, desired behavior and ownership under iteration. It did not test a specific quarterly review procedure. The operating routine below is my practitioner adaptation of the framework, not an experimental finding.
Create a compact measure record
For each important KPI, keep the decision it supports, calculation, source, scope, exclusions, target, accountable owner and last-approved version together. Record what should happen when the target is missed and who can authorize a change.
Consider an illustrative change from telephone-only support to multiple contact channels. A call-answering percentage may still matter, but the team must decide how it relates to the wider service commitment. Quietly changing the denominator would hide the change from people comparing periods.
Review on a cadence and after a material change
Choose a review cadence that fits the service. Add triggers for events such as a revised service agreement, a tool migration, a change in operating hours or a transfer of responsibility. The trigger initiates a review; it does not automatically justify changing the target.
- Confirm the purpose. Identify the management decision and service objective.
- Inspect the definition. Check calculation, scope, exclusions and data source.
- Discuss behavior. Ask whether the measure encourages the intended action and what it may overlook.
- Choose an outcome. Retain, revise, replace or retire the measure, with a named approver.
- Communicate the change. State the effective date and implications for historical comparison.
Protect comparability
When a definition changes, preserve the earlier definition and its reporting period. If old and new results cannot be compared directly, say so in the report. Where feasible, evaluate both definitions during a transition before adopting the new one.
A change log should explain what changed and why, rather than simply noting that a dashboard was updated. That gives a CIO a basis to distinguish a genuine service movement from a measurement change.
Keep approval separate from convenience
The person who maintains the report may not be the person who can approve the service commitment. Make that distinction clear. Analysts can identify data problems, delivery leaders can explain operating conditions, and an accountable owner can decide how the measure should change.
The research does not establish a universally optimal review frequency or prove that iteration is the strongest causal driver. It offers a useful reason to examine whether measures have a working review process. Start with one service and check whether its team can explain who owns the definition, when it was last reviewed and what would trigger the next review.
Source and interpretation
Hany Taha Badawy Saqr, Key Performance Indicator’s KPIs Reliability in Decision Making: In People Management, Process Optimization and Marketing, DBA dissertation, International Business School of Scandinavia, 4 March 2022.
Relevant PDF pages: 50–53, 60–62, 67, 73–78. Examples and operating routines in this article are practitioner adaptations; they are not additional survey findings. The dissertation is not presented here as a peer-reviewed journal publication.