When helping clients develop measures, or key performance indicators (KPIs), for their Balanced Scorecard or strategy management system, one of the most common questions I hear is:  “What do we do about setting targets for our measures?”

And, as every good consultant knows, the answer is: “It depends.”  It depends, for example, on how mature your measures are (Have you used them before and, therefore, have historical data?) or whether there are benchmarks you can use from similar organizations or an industry association.  In some instances, you may not even want to set targets for the first year or so, that way you can collect baseline today to use to set future targets.