• What your strategy to compete in the marketplace is.
Departmental measures should be linked to corporate strategy. Everyone should be heading toward the same goal. Often companies find that one department may be establishing metrics that compete with another department's measures. Needless to say, this often works against customer satisfaction. To help departments stay focused, ensure that the corporate strategy is well defined and clearly communicated. Ask each department to keep its measures related to the corporate strategies and measures.

• What your customers want.
Companies fail when they develop a measurement system without asking customers what it takes to keep them. Your list of prospective projects could be endless. Your customer can tell you which things are the most significant. Make sure the metrics you choose are based on input gleaned from talking with (and surveying) your valued customers.

Keeping these goals in mind, choose metrics that are recurring, stable over time, and reflect project management level metrics, such as a balanced scorecard would depict.