Practicioner Checklist
Practicioner Checklist
This checklist for measuring success using Clue for investigations and intelligence management is intended to shape or inspire your thinking. It includes practical, best-practice guidance drawn from tried and tested workflows and configuration in Clue, and incorporates principles and lessons learned from across the community and industry.
We are always looking to evolve our guidance based on your learnings and experience. Please comment below or reach out with questions, thoughts, or improvements. If you make changes to your Clue configuration, the data you capture, or the way you measure impact as a result, we would also like to hear about that.
This Practitioner Checklist is part of a suite of best-practice content for Measuring Success and Impact.
See the Practitioner Checklist brought to lfe in – Measuring Success Checklist – Scenario- The Bright Foundation
And how organisations can define, track, and communicate the impact of their intelligence and investigations work. Measuring Success – Clued Up
How to use this checklist
This checklist is primarily designed for:
- Those accountable for aligning or implementing success metrics, assurance, reporting, governance, or configuration. This may include investigators, intelligence officers and managers.
It is intended to be used as:
- A preparedness and setup guide when designing how success and impact are measured.
- A reference checklist for those accountable for data quality, reporting, and continuous improvement.
End users should use this content as a reference to understand which specific data fields, workflows, and controls are required, and how day-to‑day actions contribute to organisational outcomes and assurance- being proactive to business needs not reactive to management information (MI) requests.
Use the actions in each theme to establish, review, or strengthen how success and impact are measured across investigations and intelligence work.
This 8-point themed checklist brings together the core principles that matter most. Used together, the themes provide a structured way to identify gaps, align priorities, and support continuous improvement.
1. Understand your organisation – context and requirements
Purpose
Ensure investigative and intelligence activity is aligned to organisational mission, obligations, and stakeholder expectations.
| Checklist item | Done |
|---|---|
| Identify and align to the organisation’s mission, and how investigations and intelligence support it. |
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| Clarify the strategic objectives investigations contribute to (e.g. prevention, detection, deterrence, enforcement, safeguarding, or compliance). |
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| Identify required outcomes (including criminal, civil, sanctions and disruption, education activities, training, and disciplinary actions). |
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| Confirm any statutory, regulatory, and assurance reporting obligations. | |
| Confirm whether there are any measurement frameworks your organisation adheres to or wishes to adopt, including functional requirements for government agencies. |
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| Identify expectations from different stakeholders – boards, leadership teams, operational users, and external partners – including the varying objectives, data requirements, formats and cadence of reporting. |
Output
- A documented statement of investigative purpose and success expectations.
- A clear reference point for what must be measured and reported and why.
2. Define success criteria
Purpose
Move beyond activity counts to define what success, outcomes, and impact look like in practice and develop benchmarking to show progress and impact over time.
| Checklist | Done |
|---|---|
| Formally define what success looks like for the investigation or intelligence function within the broader organisational strategy. |
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| Explicitly distinguish between outputs, outcomes, and impact. | |
| Define outputs (activity completed) – e.g. number of tasks completed, cases progressed, risk score. |
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| Define outcomes (results achieved) – e.g. resolutions reached, sanctions applied, prosecutions, dismissals, contracts revoked. |
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| Define impact (organisational value, operational efficiency or risk reduction) – e.g. deterrence achieved, risk reduced, compliance improved, value such as monies recovered. |
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| Support rather than override professional judgement by defining the minimum viable data required for assurance. |
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| Define where exceptions are acceptable. | |
| Define how exceptions should be recorded and explained. |
Output
A shared success and assurance baseline, evolved from organisational context and requirements, defining how investigative activity is measured, evidenced, and reported across outputs, outcomes, and impact.
3. Map success criteria to Clue data points and configuration
Purpose
Ensure success measures are supported by structured, reliable data captured at the right point in the workflow.
| Checklist | Done |
|---|---|
| For each success measure or KPI, identify the exact data required to evidence it. | |
| Map each success measure or KPI to specific Clue fields and registers. | |
| Identify structured data required for reporting areas (e.g. dropdowns, multi-selects, dates, numeric fields). |
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| Define and communicate consistent headers and naming conventions (e.g. risk level, investigation owner initials, operation name). |
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| Use fields to drive accountability (e.g. “Systems Checked” multi-select or Yes/No confirmation fields). |
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| Import or lock down key data and entities to maintain the Golden Nominal rule and prevent duplication or inconsistent naming. |
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| Configure sequential fields that align logically to the investigation workflow. | |
| Use mandatory fields where assurance or reporting depends on completion. | |
| Restrict free text where structured data is required to protect data quality (e.g. controlled dropdowns with an “Other” option and conditional fields). |
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| Standardise clear and concise link reasons and avoid free text to prevent dilution of metrics and enable trend analysis. |
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| Implement consistent tagging and categorisation (e.g. offence types, risk levels, priority). |
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| Apply mandatory fields across key registers (Outcome, Case, Incident, Task, Decision) and their associated types and subtypes. |
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| Enable tracked fields on core or custom drop-down fields to record who changed a value, when, and what changed. |
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| Use calculated fields to measure time spent in key statuses (e.g. Open → Triaged → Risk Assessed). |
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| Define example milestones aligned to agreed outcomes and KPIs and manage them using a tracked custom drop-down field. |
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| Confirm users understand that milestone timestamps reflect when a field was updated, not when the milestone was achieved. |
See our Knowledge Hub article on Tracked Fields (logging in to Knowledge Hub first)
Outcome focus
- In Clue, the Outcome Register enables you to record and analyse the results of investigations helping you measure the impact and success of your investigative or intelligence work.
- While all registers in Clue are customisable, the Outcome Register is uniquely designed to define outcomes aligned with your team’s or organisation’s mission.
- By linking records from various registers – such as incidents, information, and materials gathered during investigations – to an Outcome record, it allows you to demonstrate key achievements such as financial recoveries, civil or criminal sanctions, prosecutions, and other resolutions. This provides valuable insights into the overall effectiveness of your efforts, both current and evolving.
- NB if using the Case Register you may log outcomes of your case against the Case Record, for example the outcomes of a Criminal hearing against a defendant.
4. Pre-built dashboards for common KPIs
Purpose
Translate data into insight consistently and efficiently for different stakeholders.
Output
A defined list of Views, shared with relevant team members
- Always name Views clearly – a name you can interpret easily. Share these Views with your team according to role.
- Consider a general custodian in line with a Dashboard Manager – See Dashboard Management.
5. Effective dashboard management
Purpose
Ensure reporting is purposeful, consistent, proportionate, and used.
Checklist
- Appoint a dashboard manager with responsibility for relevance and accuracy.
- Design different dashboards for team members, managers, senior leadership and board members.
- Select visual formats appropriate for decision making needs- and how data will be provided and consumed – charts and tables in Clue, Power BI for more complex cross register views and analysis.
- Define reporting frequency and review cadence.
- Set alerts for areas that require attention such as overdue metrics using tags or calculated fields.
Output
Dashboards that drive insight and action, not passive reporting.
6. Set out your data quality standards and review mechanisms
Purpose
Ensure reported information is reliable, accurate, and complete.
Checklist
- Role-based access control- maintains data quality by ensuring only the right people have access to create, link, edit, delete or carrying out bulk actions.
- Structured webforms: Use dynamic forms to capture relevant data consistently and efficiently.
- Introduce a credibility rating: Include fields to assess the reliability of data.
- Maintain procedures for removing outdated information (see Knowledge Hub articles (logging in to Knowledge Hub first) archive management and retention management)
- Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to bring together the mission, the processes to be followed and importance of the consistent adoption for data quality. Outlining the procedures forcreating new records, case closures, outcome recording and naming convention rules etc.
- Participate in periodic reviews of case workflow and bottlenecks.
- Define clear rules for searching before creating or linking records, supported by enforced search settings and guidance on confirming a match with confidence. This helps “Golden Nominal” management, mitigates duplication to maintain data integrity and quality across the system.
- Define and establish routine de-duplication processes to identify, review and resolve duplicate records, including ownership, approvals, audit trails.
7. Training and guidance
Purpose
Effective system and process training is a key driver for measuring success and impact. It should incorporate your organisation’s mission and drivers for change and adoption.
Users and teams need to understand how data supports performance and impact indicators. This will encourage buy-in and compliance when people know the purpose of the field and why it is mandated.
Training is not a one-time endeavour during implementation – it will need continual consideration and improvement.
Checklist
- Confirm and review the materials you have and assess what you need to create to support new users or to refresh learning or behaviours.
- Consider who is responsible for your training programme, do you trust team members to train others effectively or are they missing key points and passing on non-standard practices.
- Establish a structured, ongoing training and enablement approach that is underpinned by clear, role appropriate Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).
- SOPs should define the expected use of Clue workflows, data fields, and controls, and explain how system usage supports organisational objectives, success measures, and assurance requirements.
- Use training to reinforce these SOPs, ensuring users understand not just how to use the system, but why specific fields and processes are mandatory.
- Assign clear ownership for SOP maintenance and training quality, regularly review and refresh materials, and use system usage data and feedback to reinforce good practice and address inconsistent or suboptimal usage.
- Users should join Clue Connect for further guidance and to engage with peers in the community as well as to attend role specific training or webinars on new Clue features and best practices.
Output
Informed users who understand both how to use the system and why specific data, workflows, and controls are required, resulting in good‑quality data, consistent adoption of best‑practice ways of working, and greater confidence in reporting, assurance, and decision‑making.
Questions or support needed? Submit a Support Ticket and/or speak to Customer Success about optimisation, SOPs and training.
8. Governance and Continuous Improvement
Purpose
Effective governance and continuous improvement ensure intelligence and investigation processes remain robust, compliant, and aligned to organisational priorities.
Checklist
- Establish a regular governance cadence (operational, quarterly assurance, annual strategy).
- Regularly review workflow effectiveness: Participate in periodic reviews of case workflow and bottlenecks.
- Create feedback loops: Establish clear channels and mechanisms to provide feedback on system usability and effectiveness.
- Highlight success stories: Share anonymised use cases to demonstrate impact and value.
- Run user satisfaction surveys: Share feedback on system performance with us at Clue. Use insights from reviews, surveys, and anonymised success cases to drive prioritised, evidence-based improvements.
- Use data to inform resource planning, training and support needs.
- Define clear change management and UAT protocols to ensure configuration updates are controlled and aligned between test and live instances.
- Monitor system usage to confirm ongoing compliance with internal policies and external regulations.
We hope this sparks new ideas and highlights approaches you may not have considered as you shape or refine what works for you. If you’d like to explore further or sense-check your approach, speak with Customer Success or join the conversation below. Your input helps us continually evolve our best practice content.
Related content
Measuring Success Checklist – Scenario- The Bright Foundation
Measuring Success and Impact Maturity Matrix
Measuring Success and Impact – Tool Kit
Risk Assessments and Scoring in Clue – MoRile
Coming soon!
Best practice SOP templates
Using the Clue Assessment Register to log adherence to your procedures
Data Quality Checklist
Optimising your Triage workflow
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