You Can’t Manage or Improve what You Don’t Understand
January 31st, 2007 by HalThis morning I was having a conversation with Greg Howell about measuring various aspects of project and program performance. Greg mentioned the universally accepted wisdom of Peter Drucker, "What gets measured gets done." He said it missed the point. Greg commented, "What matters more is understanding. Professor Clark Oglesby always said,"
'You can't manage (or improve) what you don't understand.'
That makes sense to me.
So here I am working my way through today's RSS feeds and I see this item, You Can't Manage What You Don't Measure, by John Reh. I read John's article a few times. After listening to Greg, I admit I was reading with skepticism. John did a good job presenting Drucker's wisdom. Is that good enough? or should we be paying more attention to Oglesby?
I won't argue for no measures. I'm now more interested in how we can bring understanding to our projects and business along side of measures. One clear way I know of doing that is with Five Whys. Anyone have other ideas?
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February 1st, 2007 at 7:05 am
Do we combine these two concepts, Hal, by saying “Only measure that which you understand.” ??
If I understand something well (say my finished good inventory), I can measure it with confidence, knowing it shoud lead me to good actions.
OTOH, if I don’t understand something well (say a nagging yield problem) measuring it will only breed frustration; driving understanding, rather than merely measuring it, will more likely lead to implmentable solutions.
Good post!
February 1st, 2007 at 7:50 am
Hal, after reading Critical Chain a while back I spent some time thinking about “understanding as the real project constraint”, rather than time. This resonated because a lot of a PM’s real fears (losing key people, stakeholder relations, changing scope, appropriate levels of documentation, having the right architect) are to do with understanding, as are many methodology discussions (pair programming, iteration lengths etc.)
Some of the interesting areas to explore are
i) How much time to spend (over) communicating ? How/whether to verify whether communication is understood
ii) How much time to spend on-boarding people/ preparing on-boarding material
iii) What is the rhythm of understanding (e.g. daily wiki updates, weekly meetings, controlled document releases). What are the media (stories, specs, pictures). What is the culture
iv) What is the ‘cost’ to the project to re-understand, or to absorb a change in understanding
v) When & what should people not try to understand/ When should the whole team understand
vi) What are the right ‘chunks’ to cut a project into - Who does this ? - can they be treated as black-box by the other teams ? How does a sub-team and a PM negotiate how they will be measured ?
Didn’t come up with any definitive answers, but it’s a fun line of enquiry and a lot of good PM practices can be linked back to an ‘understanding view’
Last story - I interviewed a PM professor in the UK years ago while speccing a tool to give Sponsors detailed granular data on a project - his response was - ‘the sponsors are usually accountants - if you give them detailed data about an area they don’t understand, they will believe they do understand and just cause trouble’
Cheers
Jim
(ps - love your work & Blind Men+ the elephant)
February 1st, 2007 at 9:54 am
I find that ‘understanding’ comes from conversation. Being in conversation about measures can contribute to understanding what is going on. Posting measures in prominent locations close to the process being measured and proximate to the people who are involved in the process can lead to further understanding.
Also, there’s nothing better to avoid misunderstanding than annotating charts calling attention to special cases, changes in process, and anomalous events.
February 1st, 2007 at 10:25 am
Aren’t humans universally/norotiously transactional? I think Drucker is right to imply a measurement is always going to drive behavior, and Oglesby simply adds that if the resulting behavior is going to be termed “management,” then there is a prerequisite of understanding.
February 1st, 2007 at 10:25 am
The challenge for managers is to decide what is most important. Metrics for metrics sake are worse than meaningless as they drive busywork.
Once we have a metric that is important, I agree it should drive another layer of investigation/discussion into what drives that metric. If we just measure something without thinking about how we can improve that metric, we may not get to the root causes and the best possible end result.
February 1st, 2007 at 4:14 pm
Diana said it better than I did…let’s not have metrics for metrics’ sake.
Hal, your steady encourgement for good conversations is very relevant as well.
The metric, per se, can be akin to using a hammer instead of a wrench to tighten a bolt. Both tools are valid, but only in the right setting.
February 6th, 2007 at 6:14 am
I agree with you and Greg completely. Wile you can complete a project you don’t understand, you can’t learn from it, or duplicate it in the future. Here’s a thought to ponder - How do you gauge (assess) understanding? One of the leading areas of inquiry in my Workforce Development blog (http://kissaneasylum.typepad.com/workforce_development/) has to do with assessing skills. Is understanding a skill or a competency? How does one assess how a person (or for that matter - an organization) comes to “understand something?