« Investing in Returns on Infrastructure | Main | Performance Management - a master framework »

May 12, 2005

Turning Measurement into Management

So you can't manage what you can't measure, and if you tell me how I'm measured then I'll tell you how I'll behave, but how can you trust me, and how can I trust your measurements?

(A presentation about the items below is here in Adobe PDF format which can be downloaded.)

As a manager, the best thing you've got going for you is feedback. You can ask for "certain kinds of feedback", in order to be more sure that you can interpret what you find out.

This can mean two different things, however:
- feedback on certain kinds of things,
- or certain ways of feeding back on things.

Usually, the management effort calls for specifying both. And together, valuable efficiency in communication should be achieved. But then the issue becomes completeness. Is enough of either requirement being accomplished?

To avoid incompleteness, companies often go into overdrive both ways. The downside of that is when overdrive becomes overkill, creating a new kind of gap between the feedback and the effort to manage. Unusable feedback throws management into reverse by cultivating uncertainty, waste or rework, and skepticism in communications.

So a plan for systemically reinforcing "measurement that matters" is a high priority.

Making this reinforcement systemic means creating a two-way communications bridge between what people plan to do about a goal and what they actually do about it. With this, the focus can be put on how well the planned and actual correlate, and emphasizing the value of the correlation will naturally drive attention to the two sides of the correlation.

Many organizations immediately think of this correlation as "compliance". But that is giving short shrift to the idea that the correlation is valuable. Managers must additionally communicate what correlation is valuable to the business and why -- in order for compliance to be culturally adopted as a performance enhancement tactic.

By clarifying the value of the compliance, managers provide credibility to the idea that the measurements they ask for are important, and people who are in position to provide feedback in the form of measurements are more motivated by the idea that they really have first-hand knowledge of how the business is doing. In that frame of mind they are more likely to show that they know.

Copyright 2004 M. Ryder

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at May 12, 2005 4:22 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.malcolmryder.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/41

Comments

Post a comment