Measurment Rules

"Isn't it about time we quit measuring professional success in one dimension, vertically, and start considering how much your actual work matches your desired work?"

1: A useful measurement should help you to understand and make decisions.
2: The cost of gathering metric shouldn’t exceed the benefit it provides.
3: The aim of metric shouldn’t threaten the safety of employees.
4: People who measure shouldn’t design it to nudge the numbers to make themselves look better.
5: Management shouldn’t have a preconceived outcome in mind and are open to whatever the data tells.
6: It is about learning
7: Use “Just enough” measurement to understand the system
8: Don’t measure individuals
9: Create Safety – Before collecting data, talk with the entire team. It’s critical that your team understands that they will not be blamed, ranked, or rated based on the data.
10: Assure your team that you won’t be using the data to evaluate them. You are depending on the team to collect the data, and you want accurate data.
11: Having distorted data is worse than having no data. If your team starts reporting the data in a way designed to make their performance look better, you will be relying on distorted data.
12: See the whole - Increase employee safety by only seeing aggregate data, not the results associated with any one employee. Otherwise you lose trust.
13: Gather Data based on your department goals, anything else is irrelevant.
14: Find the motivation - Ask why five times to get to the root cause of why we need these data in the first place.
15: You don’t have to have fancy automated data collection or an elaborate measurement program to do this.
16: Make sure the collected metric is used in a way to increase customer satisfaction.
17: Check the progress
18: Stop - if there is no reason to keep collecting the data.