In preparation for a recent consulting engagement, the client, Tim, said, “I want you to track meeting attendance. If people don't come to your meetings, I want to know why.”
Tim was worried about the cultural changes we needed to discuss for the client's ability to be more effective.
Tim had good reasons to worry about those cultural changes. We needed to determine what prevented senior leadership (and everyone else) from collaborating. Then, as a team, we needed to fix those problems. Tim has big problems with potentially massive upside potential if we can get people to work together. I'm not surprised he wants to measure things.
Meeting attendance is very easy to measure. When I create meeting agendas, I list the expected participants at the top of the agenda.
But meeting attendance is not an outcome. Meeting attendance is an interim measure that might have little effect on the outcomes.
Instead, I needed to “measure” collaboration and behaviors, because those were the outcomes Tim needed.
Instead of meeting attendance, we started to measure a variety of management cycle times, such as decision-making cycle time. (See Why Minimize Management Decision Time.)
We have plenty of tools and opportunities to measure what's easy. Measuring the outcomes we need? Often, that's much more difficult.
Easy Measures vs. Outcome-Based Measures
People only call consultants when they want to change something. Consultants can ask, “What outcomes do you want to see?” Then, find a way to measure those outcomes.
If you're an internal leader, such as a manager or coach, you can also ask the outcome question. But you might want to ask these questions too:
- What behaviors do we want to see more of and less of?
- Which stories do we want to hear more of and less of?
- How well do we create and explore alternatives? Are we satisfied with the time we took to create and then decide on alternatives?
- How satisfied are we with our people, product, and cultural leadership? Are we retaining the people we want, releasing the products we want, and creating an environment that frees people to do their best jobs?
These questions are all about outcomes. And none of these outcome-based measures are easy to measure. But they are all much more valuable to know than meeting attendance.
Tim's heart was in the right place. If people don't participate in the meeting, they might not do the work. But meeting attendance is not the same as meeting participation.
Tim can still measure.
Consider These Measures for Cultural Change
After several conversations, Tim and I agreed that we would focus on the flow metrics, starting with leadership, not the teams. We would ask the managers to help us measure:
- Aging for the leaders' decisions. That included the project portfolio.
- WIP for each leader. Most of the leaders felt they were overloaded with work. (They were.) So we asked the leaders to make a tick-mark on a piece of paper for every single effort they had to make a decision for each week. (One leader had 42 tick-marks. Just nutso.)
- Actual and desired throughput for each leader. Tim wanted to ask which efforts, and I suggested not to. I wanted honest data, not data that the leader might fudge to get a better “grade.”
You might notice these are all part of Little's Law. All of these measures led to desired outcomes.
Outcomes: Measure What You Want More of and Less Of
If you measure what you want to see more of and less of, you're more likely to get what you want.
When leaders saw how long decisions took, we had a number of discussions as to how to reduce that time. Then the leaders acted. Yes, Tim was part of that problem, and he needed to change.
As everyone realized how overloaded they were, I had a chance to explain the feedback loop durations and why “committing” to features so far in advance made their lives even more difficult.
And the throughput discussion fascinated me. I saw the same result I often see in teams. Each leader's ideal-time estimate was darn close. But their elapsed time, because of the aging and the WIP was much longer. Several leaders created value stream maps for their decisions. Eye-opening. (See Managers: See Your Cycle Time to Reduce Your Team’s Lead Time for details similar to these leaders.)
Notice that these are all quantitative measures. You might need qualitative measures, also.
Easy-to-collect measures don't always offer the insight you need. If you want to measure progress to an outcome, define the outcome. Then, see which interim measures might make sense.
My rule of thumb: the easy measures don't make sense for outcomes that solve complex problems.