I was at college when I first learned the meaning of the word perfunctory. I found it on an Economics assignment I got back from my Irish lecturer (a genius of a man, who I now count as a good friend). He comment on my - what I considered to be superb - essay on the importance of something or other and its relationship to something else still haunts me to this day.

Roger, your work is perfunctory.

At first I was ecstatic; that must be good I don't even know what the word means so he was obviously super impressed. But then I found a problem. 3 marks out of 10 scrawled in his familiar red pen did not seem to support my conception that he had found my work to be of a world class standard.

Off to the dictionary: "Perfunctory – Done as a Duty". Hmmm well ok; he got me. I hadn't really given much attention to the assignment and typical of my youth had rushed the work together at the last minute.

Many process designers approach the science of plotting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) with a perfunctory attitude. It is as if getting the KPIs is just something that has to be done; but let's not waste too much time doing it.

Here is a quick tip on how you can at least give yourself a chance of getting the KPIs close to the mark AND give yourself an actual "KPI growth path". The KPI growth path comes from an understading of the 3 different 'angles' for KPIs and the two different classes of KPIs that can be created.

KPIs can be put in place to measure the Service, the Customer and the Business. We can also add in Component KPIs, for the technically minded; but for our purpose let's assume that we're looking at Service Level Management KPIs and in that regard, component KPIs would be more relevant in other more technically focussed areas.

The two classes of KPIs are easy to understand. Objective KPIs are empirically based on hard facts and figures. An objective KPI in a manufacturing plant would be "number of defects per million opportunities" (those familiar with Six Sigma will recognize that statement). The other class of KPI is subjective and these are the ones that to the accountant/financial controller are not particularily exciting. They are the "touchy-feely" KPIs – based on emmotions and feelings.

Objective KPIs can be counted in pure numerical terms. Number of times that something happened, number of times something was missed, etc. We can apply this starting "number of…." KPI to services (Number of times service was lost due to major incidents), customers (Number of times customer attended service review meeting) and the business (Number of lost productivity minutes avoided due to proactive actions).

The subjective KPIs are a little trickier to define, and the reality is that most of the material for subjective KPIs comes from customer satisfaction surveys. For example, a subjective service KPI may be "overall feeling towards service performance", for the customer it could be "general perception of the service desk"; as for the business – well I struggle to find a subjective business KPI, given that business is business and not based on emmotions.

Now, my "growth plan" concept raised earlier comes from the fact that if you brainstorm these KPIs you should find that you come up with literally hundreds. So you can take entry level KPIs and apply them in the early days of your process deployment and then migrate to more challenging KPIs as the process and the people involved matures and learns. This way you have you ready made KPI Continual Service Improvement plan.