Without numerical measures we wouldn't know what to do. The
problem is, when numerical measures are used as targets they cause
people to think their sole purpose is to achieve them, usually to
the detriment of everything else. When managers own the targets and
use them to force performance they bring out the wrong behaviors.
People cut corners to meet the targets. And targets are everywhere.
We blinker ourselves to everything except our targets and forget
about the real needs of users. In pursuit of our targets we make
local optimizations that are suboptimal for the throughput of the
whole system, the wider organization.
Measures should reflect the true purpose of the people doing the
work, which is to improve service and quality and satisfy users,
and should therefore measure the improvements directly experienced
by users. These people are in the best position to decide how to
improve quality and performance and they should own the measures
and use them to understand their work as a system. As part of a
plan-do-check-act cycle, they should study the
actual results of changes aimed at improvement, comparing them to
expectations, analyzing the differences to determine cause, and
then identify further opportunities to improve the system.
Managers shouldn't use their measures as targets to control our
performance. Instead, we should use our measures to continuously
improve how we work so that our system performs better.
Sunday, 24 January 2010
Don't aim at the target
Posted by Simon Baker - Permalink
1 Comment
I couldn't agree more. But what do you do when the environment doesn't understand this?
Take a hypothetical situation: the end users are happy and quality is fantastic but the client and your company's executive team wants the programming done faster and for less money and feels they are paying too much for quality. They set a velocity target which brings out the wrong behaviors: the engineers respond by estimating more activities and counting in velocity some things they used to not include. They estimate more carefully. They game the system. They cut corners. The business gets the higher velocity and the quality reduction and the less expensive development, at least in the short-run.
What have you done with faced with that situation?