Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations

Forward (by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister) to Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations:

measurement is almost always part of an effort to achieve some goal. You can't always measure all aspects of progress against the goal, so you settle for some surrogate parameter, one that seems to represent the goal closely and is simple enough to measure. So, for example, if the goal is long-term profitability, you may seek to achieve that goal by measuring and tracking productivity. What you're doing, in the abstract, is this:

measure [parameter] in the hopes of improving [goal]

When dysfunction occurs, the values of [parameter] go up comfortingly, but the values of [goal] get worse.


Previous post on this topic:

• Dangers of forgetting proxy nature of data (our first post)
• Targets Distorting the System
• Measurement and Data Collection

Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister are authors of the excellent Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams