In Alan Norton’s article “Efficient Metrics: Be Careful What you Measure,” he wrote, “Good managers will do whatever it takes to make their numbers look good, especially if incentives are tied to those numbers.”
May I enthusiastically disagree with that statement and modify one word: “Bad managers will do whatever it takes to make their numbers look good, especially if incentives are tied to those numbers.”
Good managers
– recognize the interdependencies between their department and the organization
– question the validity of short-sighted, narrow measures
– propose useful metrics and correlations e.g. calculating the ratio of Service Desk incidents per capita is more useful than capturing just the number of Service Desk incidents
– weigh the cost of measuring against the potential value
– seek to convert voluntary measurements (effort to measure) into involuntary measurements (measurements derived automatically from activities)
– are leary of knee-jerk reactions to metrics in a stable system; over-reacting can negatively affect the system
– perform root cause analysis and seek to remove root causes
– accept responsibility for the system of people, processes, and technology; people are not to blame for unacceptable performance, the system is at cause
– cooperate with other managers (not compete against them) to improve the performance of all departments
– encourages curiosity within the team about causes, “Where in the system could we have prevented that problem/defect?”
– improves the documentation (in any form, not to be confused with documents) of the system continuously
– continuously simplifies the system of work e.g. every piece of information we capture must have a downstream reader, whether a human or a machine. If not, don’t capture it.
please comment and add more…
