[teampractices] interesting read on the problems with KPIs

[Dan Duvall]

Thanks for sharing, indeed! The tone is charged but, if I'm being honest, I
share many of the same sentiments and in no more eloquent terms. I've
always considered them a pretty cruel imposition for people working at an
operational level, people that have already pledged to give nearly half—and
in many cases, it's much closer to all—of their waking life to the
Wikimedia movement.

On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 12:43 PM, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> Hopefully we (as an org) are aiming for KPI's that measure actual end-user
> value and impact ("outcomes") as opposed to measuring our own internal
> amounts of work ("outputs"), or worse (e.g. "how much time an employee
> spends in the bathroom").
>

Therein lays the crux of the problem for me: Our KPIs have been employed
completely backwards. We didn't start by defining KPIs for organizational
impact (likely because we lack organizational initiatives and strategy to
begin with) or for intermediary goals (there are no intermediaries of
'undefined'). Instead, our ED mandated that teams use KPIs to measure their
own individual conceptions of success which, in the absence of any similar
accountabilities measures at the C-level, amounted to saying "prove your
worth to us." Leaving teams to formulate their own models of success
without any shared consensus about the bigger picture has also rendered our
KPIs biased and unverified—in other words, they are pseudoscientific.

Every second spent on fulfilling KPIs in an organization of such strategic
and operational disparity is a huge waste of donor money in my opinion.

And just because I saw "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it" in
the article, I have to follow up with this article. :)

http://www.druckerinstitute.com/2013/07/measurement-myopia/

-- 
Dan Duvall
Automation Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation <http://wikimediafoundation.org>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/teampractices/attachments/20151214/33f0664a/attachment-0001.html>