Finding Your Organization's Critical Success Factors

This chapter looks at the alignment between Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and external outcomes and highlights the importance of identifying CSFs—the missing link in management theory. It shows that an organization has typically five to eight CSFs, and that CSFs should be the source of all the important performance measures—the winning key performance indicators (KPIs). The main purpose of performance measures is to ensure that staff members spend their working hours focused primarily on the organization's critical success factors. It is important to understand the relationship between operational CSFs and strategy. An organization's CSFs are impacted by a number of features. Getting staff to prioritize their daily activities in alignment with the organization's operational CSFs is the ”El Dorado” of management, the essence of modern management. The chapter provides the importance of distinguishing operational critical success factors from external outcomes. The relationship between critical success factors and KPI is vital.