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Guides

Written for the person who has to make this work on Monday morning, not for a conference talk.

The order that actually works

Most attempts to put a system around work in a small company fail in the same way: somebody starts by designing the measurement. Three weeks go into KRA sheets, weights and rating scales, and by the time it is finished nobody has changed how a single task gets assigned — so there is nothing to measure, and the sheets quietly go in a drawer.

The order that survives is the other way round:

Get the work written down. One department, one month. Every job has an owner, a date and a priority, and "done" is confirmed by whoever asked for it rather than by whoever did it. Nothing else matters until this is habitual.
Let the record accumulate. After a few weeks you have something no spreadsheet gives you: what was actually promised, what arrived on time, and what came back for rework. That is most of a performance picture, and it cost nobody any extra effort to collect.
Write the KRAs from what you can now see. They will be shorter, more concrete and far easier to agree, because you are describing observed work rather than imagining it.
Only then, appraise. With the delivery half already measured, the conversation is about the judged half — which is the part a manager is genuinely needed for.

The guides below follow that sequence. If you read one, read the first.

KRA and KPI format, with examples What goes in each column, worked examples for production, quality, purchase and accounts, and the five mistakes that make a KRA sheet useless. Performance management for a small Indian company What to measure, why the yearly appraisal fails, and the four rules that keep a system fair enough to survive contact with the team. How the delegation score works Why a rate on its own is misleading, how load is credited, and how managers are held to the approvals they sit on. Task management for a manufacturing company Why generic project tools do not fit a factory, and what recurring work, staged handovers and audit evidence actually need. Compared with Monday, Trello, Asana and a spreadsheet An honest comparison, including the cases where one of the others is the better buy.

A note on measuring people

Every system on this page can be used badly. The failure mode is always the same: a number appears, somebody cannot see where it came from, and within two months the whole exercise is being quietly worked around rather than used.

Three things prevent it, and none of them are technical. Measure the managers as well as the doers, so the system is not read as a stick pointing one way. Never count sanctioned leave against anybody. And show the working behind every figure, every time — if you cannot explain how a number was reached, do not put it in front of the person it describes.

Start with one department and a month of real work.

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Common questions

Where should I start?

With the work itself, for one department, for one month. Writing KRAs for everybody first takes three weeks and the sheets are stale before you finish — once you can see what people actually do, the KRAs write themselves.

Do I need all of this to begin?

No. A board with owners and dates is useful on day one. Scoring needs about a month of real data before it says anything you should act on, and the appraisal piece only matters at review time.