Metric mania

I just survived a two and a half day meeting/seminar on setting meaningful metrics at work. It was actually extremely useful... if a little bit dry. A simple analogy was used to explain why tracking most metrics doesn't really help you reach your goals:

when you become dissatisfied with your physique you resolve to lose 15 pounds. For the next few months you track your weight gain and weight loss. The result of which is a nice graph showing your normal weight fluctuations. Instead you should chose the primary behaviors that would make your clothes fit better: eat less, excercise more. You track food/calories and excercise time/frequecy instead. This way you focus on something you can actually control and you get immediate feedback on whether or not you are on track. Every few weeks you can check your progress but you don't focus on the result.. you focus on the behavior.

After that 10 minutes of class we spent two more days choosing goals and establishing our metrics (based on previous project pitfalls). It seems like a lot but in the end I think it was worth it, and it was very gratifying to find out that we all agree on our past mistakes and that in every case we've already laid a foundation for correcting the problems. Now we need to track our progress on implementing the changes and then monitor the new systems. Simple, eh?!