Something I have been learning - a LOT, lately - is that a ton of people have been badly burned by poor KPIs, and their reaction is to say "measurements are morally wrong!" or "measurements are impossible!" I keep having this conversation with developers who say that the *chance* that a KPI is going to be misused and turned into a cudgel to beat them with means that the reject all attempts to have KPIs (or anything that looks KPI-ish).
While I understand and appreciate the sentiment, it's just wrong. It just means that they have worked for bad managers or bad companies who handle these things poorly.
In my experience, the way to use these tools is:
* No one's job depends on them; bonuses can depend on them, but never jobs.
* The people they apply to are the leaders, not individuals. You don't want people working towards the KPI, you want the team workings towards doing things right, and the KPI measures that. Putting the KPI at the level of individual contributor means they ignore the team goal to chase the KPI.
* They are an "indicator" not a "source of truth". They alert people "something looks like it is going well/right, please put your eyes on it to verify." I love the cartoon you use as an example, because I've used commit count as a metric, but the way I coached my teams to use it was to never even tell the team it was being measured... but if it looked wrong, to find out what was going on. Too many commits? Developer is kind of thrashing around for some reason. Too few? Dig in and find out what's going on. (And 90% of the time, when I saw too few commits occurring, the problem being alerted was NOT the developer... it was a lack of work being put onto their plate, but no one raised a hand and said, "we have too much slack, we either need more work or we should reduce resources on this project".)
I think when used responsibly and maturely, these things help a team stay on track and keep getting better. But yes, when used irresponsibly, they are a cudgel to beat teams over the head with.
So to me, it's not so much "don't measure, it's wrong!" it's "the managers who measure poorly also manage poorly, that is the real issue".
J.Ja
