5th August 2025

How to Navigate and Reduce KPI Overload

G'day, .

As ramping technology continues to offer us more power to analyse and report our data, and AI makes it too easy to identify plenty of things to measure, the problem of getting lost amidst too many KPIs is possibly getting harder to solve.

Part of solving this problem is a better way to classify all our existing and potential KPIs to help narrow and direct our attention.

Our topic in Measure Up today is inspired by our newest licensed PuMP Team member, Kathy Letendre who has a client that found this type of classification very useful. The original article was published 10 years ago, but I've revised it to give you a more practical way to classify your measures or KPIs so you know if, when and how to use each of them.

I hope you enjoy this topic, and find it useful. Regardless, your feedback is always welcome by hitting reply and letting me know!

Stacey Barr

PuMP Creator and PuMP Academy Host

Upcoming Events & Training...

Free Webcast: Four Ways Leaders Can Measure & Monitor Progress

Coming up soon we have a series of free educational webcasts in various time zones around the world, about , using a framework to help find the right balance between measuring activity versus impact, and measuring effort versus leverage. If you'd like to join us, or want access to the replay, you can register for a webcast in your time zone here:

• UK & Europe | Thursday 4 September 9:00am BST | REGISTER HERE
• Australia & New Zealand | Wednesday 10 September 10:00am AEST | REGISTER HERE
• Canada | Wednesday 17 September 1:00pm PDT | REGISTER HERE
• Africa & the Middle East | Thursday 25 September 10:00am EAT | REGISTER HERE
• United States | Wednesday 1 October 4:00pm EDT | REGISTER HERE

PuMP Blueprint Training

OPTION 1: Our public PuMP Blueprint Workshops are a great way to get the KPI know-how you need, collaborating and learning with others.

• UK & Europe | September 8-12 | 5 half days, online | REGISTER HERE
• Canada | October 20-24 | 5 half days, online | REGISTER HERE
• Australia & New Zealand | October 8-9 & 13-15 | 5 half days, online | REGISTER HERE
• Africa & Middle East | November 12-14 | 3 full days, Johannesburg SA | REGISTER HERE
• USA | 12-13 &: 17-19 November | 5 half days, online | REGISTER HERE

OPTION 2: You can host your own private PuMP Workshop for your colleagues, for a more tailored experience:

• Africa & Middle East: contact Peter Ndaa
• Australia & New Zealand: contact Debbie Brown
• Canada: contact Louise Watson
• United Kingdom & Europe: contact Paul Frith
• United States: contact Brook Rolter
• Other regions: contact PuMP global headquarters

OPTION 3: If live training doesn't suit you, read more and register for our PuMP Blueprint Self-Paced Program.

Using Smart Charts Training

Create the singularly most powerful chart for your KPIs and dramatically increase the speed and impact of performance improvement. Learn all the details, with loads of examples and practice, in one of our upcoming live programs:

• To suit The Americas | September 24-26 | 3 half days, online | REGISTER HERE
• To suit Australia & Asia Pacific | October 22-24 | 3 half days, online | REGISTER HERE

How to Navigate and Reduce KPI Overload

Ironically, we can measure a countless number of things in our organisations and businesses. It's easy to be overwhelmed and feel lost. But we can learn to navigate through our KPI overload to more easily decide how, when, why and whether to use each of them.

An overload of KPIs can feel like a universe of measures that is impossible to try and make sense of. But we can reduce this KPI overload by giving some order to the chaos of our measures universe.

This order is based on the principle that we measure to improve things that matter, or at least make sure the things that matter are tracking well. Some things will be more urgent to improve, and others less urgent. Some things will be more important to improve, and others less important. And this offers dimensions to a model that helps us classify our KPIs or measures in a way that we can more easily decide how, when, why and whether to use them.

Our model gives us five basic classifications of KPIs in the measures universe:

1. Performance measures
2. Business-as-usual measures
3. Political measures
4. Regulatory and benchmark measures
5. Legacy measures

Performance measures: important and urgent.

Performance measures are a subset within the measures universe. They are measures of business results prioritised by the current strategic direction. This makes KPIs in this classification both important and urgent to improve. The strategic direction acts like a gravity that pulls the relevant measures from all levels in the organisation into alignment with the current strategic goals.

This gravity metaphor may have inadvertently been the inspiration for PuMP's Results Map, which does exactly that: it pulls all the performance measures throughout the organisation or business into alignment with the current strategic goals.

[Click to see a larger image]

Performance measures are the focus of performance dashboards, and should set the agenda of routine strategic performance review conversations. These are measures an organisation sets improvement targets for, and prioritises time and resources to close their performance gaps. And that's what achieves the strategy.

Watch Our Free Educational Videos...

Here is one video that builds a little on this month's Measure Up topic:

KPI BASICS #3: What is the Purpose of KPIs and Performance Measures?. What's the real role of performance measurement? To serve the bureaucratic machine? To keep an eye on employees? To hold executives accountable? Does the role change depending on whose measuring and what they're measuring?

Visit PuMP's YouTube channel for more practical and educational videos on performance measurement and strategy execution.

Can PuMP Help You, Too?

For greater success with your strategic performance measurement, strategic alignment, and strategy execution, contact us and find out how our suite of PuMP programs could help you.