What’s easy to measure isn’t always important;
What’s important isn’t always easy to measure.
— Albert Einstein
Measures are Intelligent, needed instruments for your planning. They are crucial to anchor your dreams and projects to reality. Measures describe your strategic objectives, but they don’t cause them.
They are designed to create a shared understanding of what conditions will exist when the objectives are accomplished.
Since Purpose measures are the most important, you should set them first.
Measures:
- Valid: Accurate. Capture the essence of an Objective
- Verifiable: Think of the Verification column as your project management information and learning system. Avoid subjective interpretations – In other words, if being truthful, both a project skeptic and an advocate would agree on the degree of achievement based on the data presented. Project management information and learning system. Enables you to define and summarize how the information will be generated, tracked, analyzed, and reported, and also offers off-track clues. Ask these questions to refine:
- What kind of data will be collected? How and how often?
- Where specifically will we collect this data, and who will do it?
- How will data be turned into usable information?
- How will that information be used? By whom?
- Who else will it be shared with?
- How will it be analyzed and reported? By whom?
- What are the most cost-effective means of Verification?
- Targeted: Generically is about putting numbers and dates. Basic indications, Quality, Quantity, Time, Cost. Choose targets that are sufficient to achieve impact at the next higher level.
- Independent: Each level of objective hierarchy has its own separate measure
- Useful: Determined by how efficiently you can gather accurate data to verify
You can use a proxy(Indirect) or Unobtrusive measures when direct measures are too difficult expensive or unreliable. What you can’t measure, you can’t manage.
Without easy and valid measuring you don’t have objectives, you have a dreamy-eyed fluff.