Jerry's Blog

Why do we measure things? Especially as it relates to the performance of things and people? The first page of the newspaper (I’m showing my age) that most men turn to is the sports page. We want to know how well our favorite teams and players performed. We can recite from memory stats on our favorite players going back years. We review, analyze and discuss the previous day’s game for hours with anyone that will listen. We say things like _______ was off his game. He should have been pulled in the second inning. We are very comfortable with second guessing other peoples decisions based on as set of data that we can get out a newspaper stat page. We do this because we know that even in a season with as many games as baseball, every inning is important. We know that every pitch has an impact because they all add up to a cumulative result. We expect that the manager of the team understands this and makes small corrective actions quickly so that outcome is the desired one.

Yet when we finally do tear ourselves away from the water cooler and attempt to talk about our own stats we tend to shy away from short term stats. We are not comfortable measuring our businesses in the same way. We say things like, well that works fine for a widget factory but we are different. We do sales, and you can’t measure prospecting calls per hour (day). We are an accounting group and you can’t measure transactions. We are a software company and you can’t measure lines of code, or errors, or rework, or …….

What is it that you can’t measure on a short interval (i.e. several times per day) that if you did would allow you to make some small corrective actions quickly that would change the cumulative result? Now just go measure it. And don’t let logistics get in the way. Once you figure out what to measure, figuring out how will come. We have all kinds of communication methods even with the remotest of employees.
B-T-W – Don’t forget Unintended Consequences