Gene has some excellent points about measurement. They reminded me of a
client of mine several years ago who "discovered" quality in an airline
magazine and decided to measure everything at his firm. If measuring a
few things was good, he reasoned, measuring everything must be better.
The resulting charts took up several hundred square feet of display space
and required daily reports from almost every employee. But when I polled
employees about their use of the information they were gathering, most of
them said they had no personal use for it. Yet they happily gathered info
day after day and turned it into handsome reports to please the boss they
liked so much. Employee turnover at that time was around 20% annually.
His plan was to measure everything at first and then thin the list as he saw
what pieces of information could be combined with other pieces usefully.
Unfortunately, the more data he collected the more relationships he saw
(or imagined he saw in many cases). This feedback loop created even more
areas to measure and soon the employees began to tire of the game. Even
when one of the employees jokingly altered the corporate vision statement
to "Measure to death", he didn't get the point but instead insisted on
stricter compliance with his metrics. The last time I talked to anyone
from that organization the annual turnover rate was nearly 100%, a
statistic that was carefully measured and displayed on the metric board.
--Lon Badgett lonbadgett@aol.com "There is a big difference between burning down the house and building a nice fire in the fireplace. But if your only measurement is staying warm your metrics may not reflect the difference." Emil Gobersneke
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>