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Tales of Measurement

Measurement is important. Even more important: knowing what not to measure and not confusing the measurement with the thing measured.

Here are some examples I’ve personally experienced:

A CEO insisted that we send out weekly press releases because our competitor did. We achieved that goal, but now the press thought both companies were both bozos.

An accounting deparment spent hundreds of dollars of its employees’ time refusing to pay a salesperson’s expenses for a meal at which he’d tipped 75% of a business meal’s price. The salesperson had been talking with a prospect in a hotel coffee shop for 3 hours and they only had coffee. The tip was $5.00.

A manager required all of us to submit weekly reports on what we had done to reach the goals we had set. As a result, we set low, unimaginative goals and week by week advanced towards achieving them.

A management team thought it was succeeding in making the company a good place for women to work because harrassment complaints were rare. The team was over 90% male.

A marketing VP was satisfied with our PR efforts because we were getting the designated number of column inches per quarter. That the coverage was exceptionally dull didn’t matter to him.

A company that grew itself rapidly according to plan became a lousy place to work.

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15 Responses to “Tales of Measurement”

  1. If you can measure it it’s probably not worth managing!

  2. Measurement

    David Weinberger raises some of the questions I expect to discuss in the working in a bureaucracy section of m’ blog….

  3. Hilarious, but also horrifying – as I know it’s all true, and I’ve worked in very similar places. A LOT of very similar places.

    In fact… I feel a blog post coming on. Time to burn a few favours ;-)

  4. Measurement Gone Bad

  5. I had a supervisor once who boasted of his ability to accurately predict the time for various phases of a software project (Design and Analysis, Coding, Testing, etc). Pretty amazing, until the day I discovered how he did it. When we had burned through the budged hours for one phase, he declared that charge number closed so we had to start charging against the next! Easy to hit your numbers when you turn off the spigot at the number you predicted.

  6. One more. How about companies that determine to cut costs by cutting off necessary supplies for employees? I remember one software engineer reduced to hunting around the copying machine to look for a stray paper clip because we couldn’t get them anymore. At another company, they wouldn’t order quad pads anymore, which I needed for engineering work…so I saved my last copy and would photocopy extras as needed. Same thing when they cut supply of scratch paper (cheap yellow legal pads)…I started liberating copying paper do to my work on. If these companies had bothered to solicit employee feedback, we could have saved them money…as it was, their cost “savings” program probably cost them even more than before!

  7. When working for a petrochemical company, the procurement department started using the indicator: Number of purchase orders per buyer. The result was that the system began spliting the items that were supposed to be included into a single orden in two or more purchase orders. Effect: More cost, more time, and more paper work.

  8. A few years ago I frequently taught a 2 day class for a major (at the time) company. They required 100 hrs of education per employee per year as one measure in their Balanced Scorecard metrics. When I’d teach classes at the end of the year I’d get students who said they were attending the class because they needed another 16 hrs of education so they could get their annual bonus. They are no longer a “major” company.

  9. A company not existing anymore, at least not in name, routinely stretched the fiscal month (is that the term?) long into next month. This way the results compared to budget looked nicer. But then there were fewer days left in the next month, so what did they actually earned?

  10. (mis)Measures: a Vietnam story

    At the end of every month, Saigon would send all the Vietnam Communications Centers a report ranking them by error rate.

  11. (mis)Measures

    David Weinberger raises one of my favorite questions: Tales of Measurement .

  12. (mis)Measures

    Originally posted October 6, 2003.

  13. (mis)Measures: a Vietnam story

    Originally posted October 26, 2003.

  14. (mis)Measures

    Originally posted October 6, 2003.

  15. i think measurment is more impartant usefull of daily life and what is not to measure in this world i think nothing is .

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