What are the key process indicators (KPI's) for your agency or individual units?

I am constantly looking for other law enforcement agencies that are using key process indicators as metrics for unit performance. Basically, how does your agency, or individual units, know if they are performing well or not? How are they measuring the impact of their services? I went to an agency's Crimes/Compstat meeting recently, and heard high level executives say things such as, "we are making progress" We are on the right track" "our numbers are down from last year." As a lean six sigma practitioner, I was baffled that these statements were accepted by the CEO without any questioning at all. My first thought was, how is he validating those statements? What is he using as a benchmark? To me, it was fluff. I would ask, if someone makes a statement such as, "we are making progress," I want to know exactly what we did so that we can model that ideology throughout the rest of the districts. What problem solving model, and how was it employed specifically, that caused the drop in crime numbers?

So, here is the challenge...which agencies out there are performing exceptionally well, and can validate such with tactics that are tied to specific metrics. In the end, if you do not know what you did that made crimes go down, you really can't prove that you did anything at all. It could be nothing more than an anomoly or national or local trend that worked in your agencies favor.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI): Developing, Implementing, and Using Winning KPIs


About Lean Leaders Founder: William "Billy" Wilkerson is a Police Sergeant and 21 year veteran with the National Guard. He is currently assigned to his agency's Continuous Improvement Division and also supervises the Staff Inspections Unit. Many public service agencies have been using continuous process improvement to streamline their processes for the past several years to much success. If you are a "Lean Leader" for your agency, please contact Billy about writing on this blog and being added as a Lean Leaders Associate at www.leanleaders.org . Billy can be found on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/in/billywilkerson or by email at Billy@Leanleaders.org