Measure, but what?

Reflecting back on my career so far, one thing stands out - the desire for measurable results. From teaching you in business school, to program management, to business cases to process improvement. The chorus seems to be measure the results, and show improvement. All good, but a few key questions arise: -

1. What are you comparing against? Very often, when you embark upon a project to overhaul a known to be inefficient process, the question is, how much will you improve. But there is no baseline! No one has bothered to gather metrics for the current process because

   1. Everyone is busy holding it together with tape and band aids

   2. Everyone knows it's terrible and needs to be replaced, so why waste time measuring it

   3. who will measure it? The first step in a continuous improvement endeavor is usually to kick off a project to document the current state. This is very common. Now, when you don't even know for sure what the current state is, it stands to reason that it hasn't been ' measured'. So, this baselining needs to be a little project or work packet of it's own.

   4. Yes, let's measure it, but who is paying for it? No one wants to! Not even the folks clamoring for a baseline.

2. WHAT are you measuring? Throughput? In the end to end process, it can be defined in 17 different ways. Not least, it depends on who is sponsoring the effort. There is a bias towards MY team's throughput. It takes courage, integrity and the will to do right to look at the big picture, especially if you aren't structured in a way that you are to serve the enterprise. Unfortunately organizations often do not have a central process management function. Just to stay on the What a bit longer. It is easy to be lazy about what variables to measure. People often end up measuring variables that don't matter and ignore ones that are key. Takes thought, and time, and asking a lot of questions to get it right. You are dealing with limited patience among operations groups.

3. HOW are you measuring it? I have seen beautiful graphs with exciting rising lines showing improvement. Measured by? Self reported hours of effort by a tired data entry intern who is just hoping you will go away.

So what is the right way to do this? In my opinion, sometimes the right way is NOT to waste time measuring things. Measurement is a modern construct where everything, even psychology, is a function of statistical analysis and numbers. Does it need to be? There are cases where it makes sense to just do it. For example, a process that is old and known to be terribly inefficient. Go ahead and replace it with your strategic process

Question is: does your leader feel the same way? If not, do you have the courage to try and explain? If yes, it's this leader really a leader who is open to ideas or a boss who won't take no for an answer?

Just like there isn't one easy way to measure, there isn't a single cookie cutter algorithm to decide what to do. Don't build a flowchart, use your intuition too!