Reflection on “Keeping Score by Bowles, May 2011”

The article “Keeping Score” discussed one aspect of change management, project metrics. Through creating the right project management metrics, organization can measure up; it is easy to judge if a project is ineffective or not by its direct contribution to the bottom line. However, that is not always right, new project metrics has risen to take place beside ROI, such as customer satisfaction and risk management.

Customer satisfaction metrics have become the top priority for many organizations, because these metrics give a way for an organization to improve its culture and maturity. Many companies also focus on internal employees’ satisfaction; some of them would set employee satisfaction and retention metrics at the beginning of each year, and adjust that later based on the market conditions. Nowadays, risk management metrics are also very important, and in those, organizations track how often the risk assessment is completed, as well as the number of risks rated low initially, however, they become bigger issues later. They also track how often the risk assessments are being reviewed, and the percentage of actual risks which were identified at the early stages.

The project managers should develop solid metrics which relate to key performance indicators; because this type of metrics helps the top management to know where the projects stand. And that is why the metrics should be informative, predictive, objective, and also automated. Finally, leaders should consider how much time will be spent tracking these metrics, because simply, it might not be worth it. When constructing the metric, project managers should also keep in mind the following; metrics are often backward-looking and they can’t measure everything, also metrics should not be used to evaluate the project team members, knowing that not all metrics are worth the effort.

Some of the lessons learned from this article are that we cannot manage what we cannot control, and we cannot control what you cannot measure. Project managers need to think of the justification for having the project portfolio, because it will tell them what they should be measuring. Additionally, metrics change over time, so organizations should collect feedback on those metrics, and this feedback can be used to make the right adjustments, and then communicating these adjustments to the project team and the other stakeholders.

I mentioned a story before about a change effort that was applied in my company. Where our top management brought a consultant and explained to him some problems in the company, and they suggested the solutions and the consultant started working on training courses based on that. The consultant gave the company what they asked for, without suggesting that these problems can be symptoms, and they may not be the real problems. What I believe is that the consultant was aware of that possibility, but for commercial reasons, he decided to give the already prepared courses, which will save him a lot of time and money. Additionally, he will not take responsibility, since this is what the company asked for anyway.

I understand that the OD consultant was trying to make as much money as possible for his company, since money is the ultimate goal for all businesses, and his company has shareholders, and his responsibility toward these people is to make them wealthier. But let’s think of this from another perspective, one of the most important assets of any company/organization/business is the reputation, and if you build a good reputation, that will increase your value, which will be reflected on you share price in the market, and that will be reflected on the financial performance of the company. So why would any company want to risk its reputation? Unfortunately, some companies try to use their customers, and they don’t know the rule “The first step in doing well in your business is doing good to your customers”, and so when they say that the goal of the company is to increase shareholder wealth, it does not mean that anything works and goes.