Hi Skeptic,

I can agree with you, but it is very obvious, isn't it. Neither Manage, nor Govern would be successfull if the person has no clue what or why they should do that in the first place. Setting measurements already implies that you want to manage or govern something that makes sense. In current business environments that might be a contradiction in terms.

I am on my way to the HP OV Universe in Barcelona and most properly I will hear that statement once every half hour and most probably by individuals who can not stay within the 30 or 45 minutes of their allocated time. Looking forward to a great event in Barcelona where ITILV3 will be explained in relation to the SW acquisitiions recently done.

CU?

You're right that measurement is no substitute for management. Good management is not easy and, consequently, not often found. There are many ways in which people given the job of 'manager' try to duck out of their responsibilities and relying on measurement as substitute for judgement and understanding what is going on is just one of them.

It is also true that metrics, rightly, alter what they measure. If they are poorly chosen they distort what is measured. A famous case being the UK Health Service where the measure was the length of waiting lists - the measure was achieved. Congratulations all round. Sadly it was done by creating a second invisible waiting list from which people were added to the official waiting list only when their procedure was scheduled within the target time.

In 'Metrics for IT Service Management', I argue for using balancing metrics to try to detect and minimise this distortion - if they'd measured the length of waiting lists and the user satisfaction with the time they waited, then they'd have seen a magical improvement in one stat with none in the other, giving the game away.

I'm a bit wary of the term KPI too. You only really know what your Key Indicators are after you've been measuring them for a while - it took some time for the car dashboard to settle down to speed, distance and fuel levels as the ubiquitous standard minimum indicators. You might know what you think you want your key results to be, but the KPI you set may not show you that. Since human behavior is complex and people are not stupid, particularly when dealing with their own performance measures, setting good metrics is a subtle management task, not a suitable job for simplistic command and control freaks!

If you want to prove that you've improved something, though, you need to show how, and metrics are good for that - to tell you whether you've succeeded; if you choose them wisely.

Don't think ITIL can claim #1.. Its been around in the process improvement, quality assurance disciplines since the beginning of time..

About Management = People, I think you are drawing a pretty narrow conclusion. Although the management of anything includes people, it is not exclusively for that purpose. Our relatives in "Project Management" might have a definition that is broader, or perhaps anything who is involved in "Systems Management" market. Management is about getting the best out of anything, or more specifically getting the "appropriate performance" (assuming excellence is not always required). Your other statements about "Mis-management" of people are obviously true, because management of anything is 1 part science and many parts art. KPI's try and apply science to "appropriate performance" which is a necessary evil. Of course, poor application of science is dangerous.

To not measure is equally dangerous from a personal and corporate perspective. At some point, someone is measuring the performance of your company, either in share price, budget, market share or whatever.. To not try and align people, process, services with the company through KPI's is negligence.. Just don't live and die by the sword..

Myths of ITIL
#1 "ITIL Implementation Project"
#2 "ITIL Certification"
#3 IT Services Management = ITIL
#4 ITIL V3 (you telling me its a product = "as if service management best practice is evolving to a release schedule")
#5 ....

$0.02 (and no reference to my blog this time :)

Brad Vaughan
http://blogs.sun.com/buraddo

Skep -

Your argument confuses *what* to measure with *how* to measure.

The real obstacles to measurement are conceptual, not the methods. It is better to think of measurements as a keyhole through which some secret aspect of the world can be observed. Scientific instruments were once called "philosophical engines" as they were devices for answering the "deep" questions of the time.

Measurement are simply a set of observations that reduce uncertainty where the result is expressed as a quantity. The "uncertainty reduction" is what is critical to managers. A manager asked to make decisions under a state of uncertainty and risk can improve his performance, often financially, by using measurements. The bigger, riskier and more uncertain the decisions, then the greater the importance of measurements for competent managers.

[Myth Buster: Einstein did not get unimpressive grades. He was in fact a gifted student. After graduating 2nd in his class at Aarau school in Germany he was admitted to Zurich Polytechnic at age 17 where he remained at the top of his class until his research thesis. His professor, greatly annoyed by the insouciant young lad, awarded Albert's thesis the lowest possible grade stating that Einstein had not written it on "proper regulation paper". Thus explaining how Einstein graduated near the bottom of his class.]

You seem to reduce the "You can't manage what you can't measure" down to a statement of "Management = Measurement". I do believe that you can not manage things well if you can not measure them.

You need to get some feedback on how well you are manageing and not only by your peers or from your employees (as both might be to good), but also from a more absolute standpoint. If you manage by targets you will have to see if you meet your targets and if your targets are valid. A good manager has a gut feeling about all of this as well, enabling him/her to look where trouble may be and to improve on more intangable things, but really sound management is only valid if you can measure something.

Your ciritique on KPI is (to my humble opinion) more valid. Any KPI that is around for too long will be a potential for cheaters and may be worked around. Good management will find this out and adapt. Even better manegement will lead their employees in a way that they do not even think about working around a measurement (binding bonuses to KPI targets is OK, but it should not be the only criteria).

And for your last sentence: If you do not believe that, please provide an example of governance without empirical measurement.

Hi Skeptic,

I always love a good controversial point of view, makes everybody think.

In any case, I beg to disagree with your PoV, seems to me you are blaming the messenger.

You state "the KPI hasn't been invented yet that measures 'good'".
Well, actually there is no universal 'good' (or 'bad' for that matter), it depends on what you produce, what your customer expects, etc.... So the first question one should ask is "What is good in my context?"

Indeed, a lot of bad managers misuse metrics and KPIs.
In my experience this is mostly the result of

(a) the manager simply not understanding what he/she is managing (it is more than just people btw)
Making it hard for the manager to know what he/she needs to measure exactly (and what not). So he/she takes the easy route, buys a few books (e.g. ITIL v3) and just blindly copies what is in there. End result: a lot of numbers are being collected and crunched everyday, but there is little or no effect on what actually counts: the quality of what is being produced.

(b) mixing up metrics and goals
Metrics are there to help you understand what is going on. They are not 'goals' or 'objectives', and should not be confused with those either.

Maybe do a google on "Deming's 14 Points"

First of all, managing relates to people and budgets. In both cases, you set goals and measure progress toward those goals.
The author states, “You can’t measure people.” However, you certainly can measure whether they do what is expected of them, you certainly can measure their performance against standards, and you also can measure their relative performance against their co-workers. For the last measure, in high-performance cultures the bar is high, and for low-performance cultures the bar is low. In either case, you benchmark (measure) performance standards to see if you need to raise the bar for you team or not.
If this author’s twelve workers really are subject to his whims about who is “good” or “bad” which changes as he states, “from hour to hour depending on who had pissed me off last,” then I really feel sorry they have to deal with this incompetent of a manager. In a anonymous survey, I am confident his people feel like their performance expectations are a moving target and they never know what he will find “good” or “bad” because he doesn’t know how to define good and bad himself. It is likely to be a function of the external pressures he is facing rather than any concrete objectives he has laid out for his team like a competent manager would.
This article was obviously written by one of the masses of inept managers out there that don’t know what to do, don’t like to be held to goals themselves, and don’t like their poor performance against objectives measured at all. These are the same desires of people in ghettos and trailer parks all over this country; they don’t want to be held to others’ ideas about performance standards either, and with good reason – they don’t measure up.
There are ways to measure people’s performance in objective ways. There are ways of capturing the inherent variability in a measurement system and determining how much variability the measurement system itself contributes to the measurement and how much is the actual process performance itself.