Harnessing the Power of Visualization: Personalized KPIs for Faster Research Decisions

While it’s easy for team leaders in biopharma research to spend most of their time worrying about regulatory requirements and compliance, it’s just as important to pay attention to strategic goals that make processes more effective and allow your teams to make decisions faster. In drug development, it’s impossible to completely control the outcome. In fact, you won’t even know if you’re heading in the right direction until well into clinical trials. Until then, it can be hard to tell if you’re making progress or going in circles. So leadership teams need tools to review their teams’ performance on a shorter timescale.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are a well-established way to measure the quality of the work when you can’t directly measure or predict the outcome. Personal KPIs take this to the next level by putting individual employees in charge of how their productivity will be measured. So by encouraging your team to adopt personal KPIs, and giving them the tools to visualize these metrics, you can simultaneously boost employee satisfaction and motivation across the organization.

What are Key Performance Indicators?

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are essentially performance metrics that teams track to measure progress towards a goal. But while metrics can measure anything, KPIs are the specific metrics that are critical to the success of the team. KPIs help teams make faster decisions by focusing resources on the most relevant business priorities.

Most KPIs measure the performance of the team as a whole: the number of compounds screened; the average turnaround time on experiments; the number of hits that transition to leads. But it can be hard for individual team members to translate the group’s KPIs to what they need to do as an individual.

So to address this many team leaders have begun encouraging their teams to create KPIs for themselves. These personal KPIs may be tied to the team’s KPIs or directly to the team’s strategic goals. This means delegating more responsibility to individual employees.

Why Personal KPIs?

When implemented correctly, personal KPIs can benefit both the organization and its employees. Leadership can delegate decision-making processes while relying on the KPIs to ensure decision quality. This allows leaders to focus more on strategy than operations, enables better decisions at the individual level, and boosts employee satisfaction.

Personal KPIs can also lead to better outcomes by helping employees identify the factors that make their projects most successful and negotiating better solutions with their colleagues. This ownership and confidence will provide a huge boost to motivation across the workplace.

Visualizing Personal KPIs

It isn’t enough for your team to just set KPIs and forget about them. To stay motivated, team members need an immediate and easy way to see how their KPIs compare to their goals. Visualizing KPIs helps team members understand how their KPIs fit into the larger picture, making them feel more tangible and more feasible. And being able to see long-term trends helps them address problems before they turn into crises. 

But visualizing these insights isn’t as easy as designing a dashboard. First, you need access to the data that defines those KPIs. And that’s where efforts to operationalize KPIs often fail.

For many organizations, the data needed to calculate even high-level KPIs is stuck in spreadsheets and slide decks where dashboards can’t access it. Personal KPIs often require even more detailed and specific information that may not actually live in those documents.

To be able to report and visualize personal KPIs, pharmaceutical organizations need research lab management software that not only tracks all the data needed to calculate these KPIs but encourages them to enter this data for later access.

Setting and Visualizing Personal KPIs in an R&D Lab

Defining personal KPIs starts with understanding your team’s overall goals and creating a clear model for how you’ll get there. What does success look like for the next milestone? What data do you need to get there? What factors will minimize cost and effort along the way?

Once you understand the team’s goals and KPIs, you can map metrics to individual team members. What turnaround time on new compounds do your medicinal chemists need to achieve the team’s screening targets? What hit rate does the biologist defining the screens need to achieve? What percent of instrument uptime does the lab manager need to provide?

The specific KPIs will depend on the lab and the science. But the more you explore the framework of personalized KPIs, the more ways you’ll find to boost productivity.

Conclusion

Personalized KPIs are an important tool that R&D leaders can use to maximize their teams’ chances of success. And easily accessible dashboards and visualizations make them even more powerful. Whether or not you already track team-level KPIs, personal KPIs tracked by your research lab management software could be a great option for your team too.

For guidance on aligning platform functionality with regulatory standards, check out our article Mapping System Features to FDA and EMA Requirements in Research Settings.