Comments on: You can’t measure everything effectively

By: Robert Watkins

Robert Watkins — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:19:02 +0000

The other parts of this to remember are summed by (Jason) Yip’s Law:

Anything can be made measurable in a way that is inferior to not measuring it at all

You can’t manage things you can’t measure because you can not determine if you are succeeding or not. This doesn’t mean that you have to manage it, nor does it mean the way you choose to measure something is effective; indeed many ways of measuring are actually harmful.

By: Mark Graban

Mark Graban — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:39:10 +0000

Patrick – great example. I think many of the employee satisfaction measures are flawed or incomplete…

Mark

By: Perryn Fowler

Perryn Fowler — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:41:21 +0000

Interesting, I always thought that it was Tom De Marco who said that.

and he has since changed his mind

http://www2.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2009/0709/rW_SO_Viewpoints.pdf

By: Patrick

Patrick — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:39:30 +0000

Hi Mark,

Here’s a great example: employee happiness/satisfaction. Important to manage, hard to measure.

By: Jeff Santini

Jeff Santini — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:33:20 +0000

Just reading “Out of the Crisis” by Deming and one of the diseases he mentions in Chapter 3 is “Running a company on visible figures alone” Disease number5 on page 121.

He then give nine examples of unknown or unknowable numbers that are nevertheless important to a successful organization. Number one being “the multiplying effect on sales that comes from a happy customer”

By: Danilo Sato » Blog Archive » GQM: Metrics come last

Danilo Sato » Blog Archive » GQM: Metrics come last — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:43:27 +0000

[...] by a post on the Lean Blog, Pat reminds us that you can’t measure everything effectively. Having written my Master’s thesis on metrics for Agile projects, I’ve learned and read [...]

By: Tweets that mention thekua.com@work » You can’t measure everything effectively -- Topsy.com

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:07:12 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by planettw, Pat Kua. Pat Kua said: New blog entry, "You can't measure everything effectively": http://bit.ly/7o3C5r [...]

By: Mark Graban

Mark Graban — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:27:39 +0000

Thanks for the link. What’s an example of something in your organization that’s important to manage, but is hard to measure??