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>when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. I see this get thrown around a lot but it's not really true. If a metric can be gamed then I

by na85 6y ago

>when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. I see this get thrown around a lot but it's not really true. If a metric can be gamed then I agree it's a flawed or poor metric, but there are definitely good metrics that make good targets as well. Concrete example: I used to work in aircraft maintenance putting Search and Rescue aircraft into the sky to go pull people out of lakes or out of crevasses, etc. One of our KPIs/metrics was the number of hours spent in what's called the "Red" state, i.e. you have no serviceable aircraft that can fly if a callout happens, meaning the region is lacking airborne SAR assets. There isn't really a way to (legally) game this metric. Either your aircraft is serviceable or it's not. The only way you could cheat is to just lie on your statistics and release aircraft for missions that are actually not serviceable, but that's going to bite you in the ass sooner or later, would require a conspiracy of 10+ people to lie on official airworthiness documents, and doing so is a federal crime not to mention a big ethical no-no. Our monthly target was zero. I.e. we tried to go each month keeping at least one serviceable aircraft at all times. We only hit that target a few times while I was in that job but it was rewarding, and on months where the Red indicator was particularly large I would drill down with senior staff to determine if it was an anomaly or if there was a trend starting, and we'd address it. And yet it's still a good measure because it's directly measuring what was our primary objective (i.e. can you put aircraft in the sky to carry out rescue missions or can you not?)

lhopki01 6y ago
That doesn't provide a way of measuring your individual performance only that of the team. Analogous to that for me would be amount of downtime in our system but that's a whole team metric not an individual one. In most cases the measurements are proxies for your "share" of the job. In these case they are almost always bad. In all my years in tech I've not seen a way of directly measuring what I do.
- outworlder 6y ago
  > That doesn't provide a way of measuring your individual performance only that of the team Exactly! Team metrics can be useful. It is important to know if, say, a team is missing deliverables more than another team. Then you can potentially track down _systemic reasons_. On an individual level? Can't do it, there's not enough context. On a pure "lines per code" metric, the most important members on my team would have an abysmal metric. But if they didn't do their jobs, the productivity for everyone else would drop enormously.
- na85 6y ago
  >That doesn't provide a way of measuring your individual performance only that of the team. Indeed. Is there a clause I'm unaware of in the saying I quoted that stipulates a target/metric must be an individual one only?

by na85 6y ago

lhopki01 6y ago

That doesn't provide a way of measuring your individual performance only that of the team. Analogous to that for me would be amount of downtime in our system but that's a whole team metric not an individual one. In most cases the measurements are proxies for your "share" of the job. In these case they are almost always bad. In all my years in tech I've not seen a way of directly measuring what I do.

outworlder 6y ago
> That doesn't provide a way of measuring your individual performance only that of the team Exactly! Team metrics can be useful. It is important to know if, say, a team is missing deliverables more than another team. Then you can potentially track down _systemic reasons_. On an individual level? Can't do it, there's not enough context. On a pure "lines per code" metric, the most important members on my team would have an abysmal metric. But if they didn't do their jobs, the productivity for everyone else would drop enormously.
na85 6y ago
>That doesn't provide a way of measuring your individual performance only that of the team. Indeed. Is there a clause I'm unaware of in the saying I quoted that stipulates a target/metric must be an individual one only?