(John Wiley & Sons Inc.: Hoboken, NJ) -- Key performance indicators (KPIs), while commonly used around the world, have never been clearly defined, until now. Management personnel identified measures as KPIs although these measures never have been true KPIs.

Key performance indicators represent a set of measures focusing on aspects of organizational performance that are the most critical for the success of an organization. They help companies define and measure progress toward organizational goals.

The new book, Key Performance Indicators, Second Edition: Developing, Implementing, and Using Winning KPIs (Wiley: 2010) provides a practical, step-by-step model to simplify the complex areas of KPIs and help organizations avoid the common pitfalls.

Written by performance expert, David Parmenter, CEO of Waymark Solutions, Key Performance Indicators  shares his in-depth understanding of “winning KPIs” and provides guidance on how to effectively and successfully implement KPIs in an organization in only 16 weeks.

Once an organization has defined its mission and vision, identified its strategic goals, and short listed its critical success factors, it needs a way to measure progress toward these objectives. The lack of understanding performance measures has led most monitoring and reporting of measures to fail. The casualty has often been the balanced scorecard, a brilliant tool that can only work if the appropriate measures are in it.

Key Performance Indicators represents a significant shift in the way KPIs are developed and used, with an abundance of implementation tools. The book includes:

• A letter to the CEO
• A 12-step model for developing and using KPIs with revised guidelines
• Implementation guidelines for small to medium enterprises and not-for-profit organizations
• How to brainstorm performance measures
• A kit to help you find your organization’s critical success factors
• New examples and illustrations
• Worksheets, workshop programs, and questionnaires
• More than 300 performance measures
• Updated templates for reporting performance measures
• A facilitator’s (consultant) resource kit
• References to “free” or “for fee” electronic media to help you save time

Rarely new to the organization, most KPIs have either not been recognized or are gathering dust somewhere, unknown to the current management team. Key Performance Indicators provides organizations, business leaders, writers, accountants, and consultants the tools necessary to identify and measure the aspects of organizational performance that are the most critical for the current and future success of the organization.

It has been said that Key Performance Indicators is the missing link between the balanced scorecard work of Robert Kaplan and David Norton and the reality of implementing performance measurement in an organization.

David Parmenter is an international presenter who is known for his thought-provoking and lively sessions, which have led to substantial change in many organizations. He is a leading expert in the development of winning KPIs, replacing the annual planning process with quarterly rolling planning, quick month-end processes, and converting reporting to a decision-based tool.

Parmenter’s work on KPIs is recognized internationally as a breakthrough in understanding how to make performance measures work. He has delivered workshops to thousands of attendees in many cities around the world including Sydney, Melbourne, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Tehran, Johannesburg, Dublin, London, Manchester, Edinburgh, and Prague. Parmenter has worked for Ernst & Young, BP Oil Ltd., Arthur Andersen, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, and is a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. He is a regular writer for professional and business journals. He is also the author of Pareto’s 80/20 Rule for Corporate Accountants (Wiley, 2007).