The Mistake of Measuring Everything
I recently participated in a seminar with Larry Dribin of Pearl Street Group. Larry did a beautiful job with a talk called something like “You Get What You measure” Afterwards I added the corollary “If you measure everything you get nothing”
I have seen a number of organizations that just start measuring everything. They figure they will do something with the measurements sometime. Measurement becomes a burden with no ROI. And people can’t respond by doing the best job on what they are measured against.
I saw this in my own personal life last year. I measure a lot of things…. Calorie intake, calorie output from exercise, body fat, and percent protein are among the key measurements I use to keep my weight and health under control. Then I realized I could measure something else… With a pedometer I could see how far I was walking per day (not exercise but just moving around at work, etc.) and how many calories that burned. I clipped this nerdy device onto my belt (much to my wife’s displeasure) and collected all this data. 2 to 3 miles per day just living. Interesting and several hundred calories burned in the process. But in terms of weight management what could I do with this data? Answer, nothing. I already captured my basic metabolism and my exercise. I had calibrated my living habits without this pedometer data. I found it was not useful. I stopped wearing this thing on my belt. And nothing changed. Just because I could measure it didn’t mean I would get any value in measurement. And if I used the data I could have ended up putting my entire weight management out of balance… Talking credit for calories burned that were already accounted for.
We once had an employee who determined he could establish the value of code by how much of the time it was executed. He claimed that was the actual measure.. The work performed by the code. He was actually a manufacturing engineer and material scientist working on our design for manufacturability product. But he was excited about this idea and presented it to me. I explained as gently as I could that this measurement would be useful for code optimization and timing but wasn’t going help us estimate better. He wrote a program over several months to measure how much work was done, convinced I just didn’t grasp his breakthrough, and presented this as a gift to me. I must admit I never executed it. It just didn’t measure anything I cared about for estimating labor to develop or maintain software.
You get what you measure… measure what you care about.
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