Killersite Blog

Here’s a nice article titled “Work vs. Progress” explaining the difference between managers that know how to do their job vs. lazy managers that think if they have something to measure then they can make easy decisions.

…with complex work, building software, running a business, writing a novel, it is harder to identify true progress. Some of the work will require thinking and exploration which may go on for hours or days before there are visible results. Other work may involve so many different sub-tasks or conversations with others that there’s no way to know how efficiently the work is being done, or if the effort expended is contributing to progressing the project. Complex work, or work with large numbers of people, always makes it harder to separate work from progress.

While most times lazy managers will fall back to the simplistic way of finding some metric to measure and focusing on that as a proxy for Project Progress. The most insidious form of this is when managing people and trying to put metrics on their behavior as a way of grading team members.

• How many hours you were in the office
• Number of Reports, specifications written
• Presentations given
• Calls made
• Lines of code written
• Number of bugs fixed
• E-mails sent

All of these are poor measurements, since they only capture activity. Fixing more bugs on a given day may mean that you only chose easy ones to work on. Lines of code measures only verbosity, not quality. All measurements have loopholes that can be exploited. But since it’s so easy to measure these things, it’s common to see them.