Measures
Before you measure anything, you should carefully determine your objectives. What are you trying to achieve, and what is the purpose of making the measurements? Moreover, you should ask, are measurements the best way of achieving your goals?
Why Measure?
There are many reasons why you might measure something:
- To better understand its nature
- To ensure that it meets requirements in some way
- To investigate how it changes over time to control or improve it
- To gain management support for the activity
- To fulfill a service level agreement or to conform to laws or regulations
- To deliver on a promise or agreement
- To prove to yourself or others that you are not wasting time, i.e., to demonstrate the benefits
- To identify problems and appropriate solutions
- To justify the allocation of resources
- To educate people
- To enforce performance or because you have been told
- To provide feedback that facilitates learning
Who are you measuring for?
You rarely measure for only one reason or only one stakeholder. Stakeholders will measure you or want to see different measures from you, depending on their perspectives.
For change and KM projects, there are usually two main stakeholders:
- Senior management who wish to see measures based on tangible business outcomes such as increased revenue or reduced costs
- Employees who want to know “what is in it for them.”
The Dangers
There is nothing inherently wrong with measuring. Measuring is a powerful tool. But some things are not easy to measure and may even be impossible to measure directly, and the very act of measuring can often cause distortions or unintended side effects. Measures used without due care and consideration can be misleading and dangerous.
Targets
People, teams, and organizations are often given ‘targets’ or KPIs (key performance indicators) by which they are ‘measured.’ For example:
When booking an appointment a patient should not have to wait more than 48 hours to see their doctor.
Such a measure can be recorded and used as a method for ‘measuring’ performance to improve that performance or simply ensuring conformance.
Targets imposed this way are often ‘gamed’ in that people will try to meet the target but avoid any real change. In the example above, a doctor’s surgery can instantly reach the goal by only allowing patients to book an appointment on the same day. The target is met at the expense of the objective, i.e., improving patient service. This is a real example from the British National Health Service that was gamed this way.
Imposing targets on someone to enforce performance rarely works and frequently has the opposite effect.
Targets | Vanguard ConsultingEnsuring ownership of targets
For targets to be valuable, they should be designed and owned by the people using them and not enforced by senior management. Their aim should not be to enforce compliance but to provide a feedback mechanism for learning and improved decision-making.
In the example above of the doctor’s surgery, that would mean rather than the government imposing the target that, the doctors and staff that comprise an individual surgery come together to explore how they might improve their service and then agree on a set of measurements that they can monitor over time to determine if things are getting worse or better, especially in light of initiatives to improve the service. Such measures are unlikely to be ‘gamed’ as the people involved will own them and see them as ‘learning tools.’
Rewards
Rewards Punish. Rewarding people for meeting targets is detrimental to quality, motivation, and pride in work and exacerbates ‘gaming.’ Rewards are:
- manipulative
- destroy cooperation
- ignore complexity and tend to promote a single solution blindly
- deter risk-taking and creativity
- undermine interest and intrinsic motivation
Punishments
Punishments for not meeting targets are even worse! In the above example: “Doctors would not allow advance bookings because it meant they increased the possibility that they would not see a patient within the Government’s 48-hour target period and would face a penalty of up to £11,000 as a result!”
Resources
- LinkedIn Post: KPIs Don’t Improve Decision-Making In Most Organizations by Bernard Marr
- LinkedIn Post: Caution: When KPIs Turn To Poison by Bernard Marr
- Mail Online: A&E patients left in ambulances for up to FIVE hours ‘so trusts can meet government targets’
- BBC News: 48-hour target ‘damaging GP care’
- Telegraph: NHS waiting time targets for ambulances and A&E scrapped
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