Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog: Deming, lean thinking, innovation, customer focus, continual improvement, six sigma.
October 8, 2005
Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations

Forward (by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister) to Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations:

measurement is almost always part of an effort to achieve some goal. You can’t always measure all aspects of progress against the goal, so you settle for some surrogate parameter, one that seems to represent the goal closely and is simple enough to measure. So, for example, if the goal is long-term profitability, you may seek to achieve that goal by measuring and tracking productivity. What you’re doing, in the abstract, is this:

measure [parameter] in the hopes of improving [goal]

When dysfunction occurs, the values of [parameter] go up comfortingly, but the values of [goal] get worse.

Previous post on this topic:

Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister are authors of the excellent Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

2 Responses to “Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations”

  1. Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog » Outcome and In-Process Measures Says:
    July 14th, 2008 at 9:48 am

    the outcome measure could be the percentage of people who do not get polio (the result). An output measure, for example, would be the number of people vaccinated with the polio vaccine (the output). Often we measure inputs (amount of money spent) or outputs (number of people vaccinated)…

  2. Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog » Why Setting Goals can Backfire Says:
    April 27th, 2009 at 12:56 pm

    The problem with goals is what actually happens in organizations. They create serious systemic problems and should be avoided…

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