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One thing the often bugs me is when management demand more analytics on the work flow of a department. This usually entails more manual logging by the staff, wh
by Tycho 12y ago
One thing the often bugs me is when management demand more analytics on the work flow of a department. This usually entails more manual logging by the staff, which takes time out of their day. 'But we need this information,' they say, 'otherwise we're just flapping about in the dark not knowing the full picture.' Or something to that effect.
The thing is, how is it that we seemed to manage just fine without all those business analytics in the past? Somehow people were able to exercise their judgement and run the department effectively. Not that there's no room for improvement of course, but maybe you'd be better skipping straight to diagnosis/solutions rather than spending time logging and collecting indicators.
- Pamar 12y agoI believe this is a result of the shift from production of physical goods to a more service-oriented economy. If your main concern is "manufacturing X" it is usually fairly simple to tally "Number of X produced" (even "Number of X produced by operator #128") number of defective parts, number of returned items after sale... If you deal with software development, translations, advertising, copy editing getting an idea of "productivity" is far more complicated. Do you count "lines of text written by operator #128"? This might make marginal sense for translators (and you are still missing any idea of quality/defects, because even if a customer rejects your work as "completely wrong" you won't get any specific metrics) but completely misses the mark for the other examples I listed. So yeah, we are stuck with the idea that "you cannot control what you cannot measure", but we have a serious deficit in terms of measures.