What gets measured…
- Jerome Harris
- 33 minutes ago
- 2 min read
If there's one management saying that Quality Managers love to use, it's 'what gets measured gets managed'. It's not that it's not true - it is - but it is often misunderstood, with disastrous consequences.
The full proposition is: 'What gets measured gets managed - even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so.'
Simon Caulkin’s article from The Guardian is prescient for the construction industry as we ramp up our digitisation.
We need to ask ourselves two things:
Are we measuring and targeting the things that we need to know to improve our business? The things that drive improvements in consistency and right-first-time delivery. Or are just reporting on the data that we have.
Is our target-based reporting driving the right actions for our leaders and behaviours for our staff and subcontractors?
NCR Example
One example of this is setting targets for cost of non-conformance. Initial thinking would suggest that if cost of non-conformity is a big impact on project success and timely completion then it makes sense to accurately measure the cost of NCRs/Defects and to set targets to bring this cost as low as possible.
The impact of this type of strategy is nearly always twofold:
Reporting reduces across the board - things that would otherwise have been raised get fixed quietly without the need for reporting.
Costs of NCRs/Defects are estimated down to a level where they don’t need to be reported.
So what management thinks it is seeing is a reduction in NCR or Defect costs - but actually there are little improvements and a lot of data is being lost.
What should we be measuring?
That’s up to you - bear in mind that unless you’re fully digitised, every request for data puts a burden on your project.
Whilst it appears easy to measure money, keep in mind that spend is only one outcome of activity, it does not define not the activity itself. If you want to improve your spend don’t focus on the dollars, focus on the process. If you improve that, the cost improvement will follow.