9 Criteria for Better Metrics

An international collaborative leadership expert, Pollyanna developed the models and tools for collaboration and collaborative leadership through her 38 years of working inside and consulting with corporations and organizations. She helps companies create workplaces where talent and innovation are unleashed--making them more productive, efficient and profitable. Pollyanna co-authored "The Agile Culture: Leading Through Trust and Ownership" and "Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility". She also co-founded the Agile Leadership Network (ALN) and chairs Agile Leadership Summits in the United States and Europe.

  Agile   Stakeholder Management   Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

Metrics are easy to get wrong, and the price tag can be high for projects and stakeholders. Are your organization’s metrics providing value or just getting in the way of your team? Here are nine criteria for determining if your current metrics should be tweaked or removed, and if new ones would be more useful.

Take a look at all the metrics in your organization that affect your team. Are they providing value or just getting in their way? Are there any metrics that would be useful to your team? How can we tell useful metrics from damaging ones?

In this excerpt, we will look at whether your current metrics or any new ones you want to create are truly effective. We need to consider these nine criteria:

• What is your goal; what you are trying to achieve?
• Is the metric valuable to the team that is using it?
• How long will it remain valuable?
• What is the cycle time for action based on this measure?
• Are the candidate measures actually aligned with the business needs?
• Do they build ownership with the team?
• What is the true cost of collecting and analyzing the data?
• What are the side effects of using this measure?
• How could they be misused and damage our focus on value delivery?

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

1. What Are We Trying to Achieve?

Before selecting any metrics, first consider what …

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