State of the Art of Project Management
February 7th, 2004 by HalHere's more on the January 27th posting.
3. Be careful what you measure; you will certainly get it. We act in accord with our interests. Measurements allow us to choose among alternative actions. And still, each of us will take care of what matters most to us in the moment.
Let's be honest. People are selfish. I know I am. I don't know anyone who is not. I don't mean to say that we can't also be selfless. Of course we can. But not 'til we have our own concerns addressed.
When a supervisor, manager, or organization declares measurements people will quickly adjust their behavior to correspond to their understanding of the measurements. Frank Patrick has a wonderful posting Tell Me How You'll Measure Me and I'll Tell You How I'll Behave. But most organizations have too many measurements. Far too many for each person to understand, let alone behave in accordance with them. What inevitably happens is each person behaves according to some subset of the measurements and according to their peculiar understanding.
One last thought…the practice of establishing these measurements keeps management detached from the exactly the operations that they are interested in performing well. Try something else: forego the measurements. Get engaged instead.
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February 9th, 2004 at 2:56 pm
Mike,
As you note I am not saying go without measurements. The unintended consequences of measurements, particularly a slew of meaurements, leads to all kinds of trouble.
The best situation I’ve seen is a small set of measurements that tell the people how they are doing while they are doing (in the moment). This allows people to make adjustments without looking outside the team organization. While not quite autonomic control, the team has the chance of staying in control.
February 10th, 2004 at 2:20 pm
The simple stuff is similar to common sense — common sense is quite uncommon — the simple stuff is not so simple.
February 15th, 2004 at 11:30 am
Paulo,
Yes, precisely, trust is at the base of this.
This site and others posting on the same topic got me thinking, and I wrote a little more about it here. trying to connect some similar threads from different blogs.
February 15th, 2004 at 5:52 pm
Alexander,
I read your article and I hope you don’t mind if i add some thoughts.
I agree that in a project we have things that we can measure and things that we cannot measure.
My opinion is that things that cannot be measured are responsible for the results of things that we can measure and vice-versa. Example? Commitment is one of them.
We cannot measure based only in one of them: measurable or not measurable. We need both and we need to establish the links between them to sense what is going on and decide.
But being humans sometimes (or most of the time) we measure what we want to measure, or we see what we want to see (Hal always tells me this) and to avoid it we need to ask ourselves and ask the team:
What are we measuring?
Why are we measuring?
How will we measure?
What are we going to do with these measures?
Without sharing these questions with your team and trying establish a common sense from different views of the members I have no doubt that we will fail in our attempt to use the measures to improve flow in our projects.
February 15th, 2004 at 5:53 pm
Sorry I am the anonymous
February 16th, 2004 at 9:38 am
Paulo,
I agree. The approach to metrics that you describe is one that acknowledges both the value of measuring a process, while also acknowledging the fact that there are things we can’t measure, and that these things also matter. In these areas we must obtain our knowledge not through objective metrics, but through more subjective approaches.