Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations by Robert D. Austin

I'm about a quarter of the way through Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations by Robert D. Austin.  It is a real eye-opener for anyone tasked with developing metrics in an organization.  In the foreword, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister explained how impressed they were with Austin's PhD thesis and encouraged him to write a book on the topic.

So far, I have been helped by Austin's discussion of the role of measurement in organizations and prior measurement models.  They key finding of his work is the source of dysfunction in measured tasks.  Whereas previous work has ignored dysfunction or treated it as a rare anomaly, Austin shows that it is common in measured tasks.

While many proclaim that "What gets measured, gets done", I read an alternate version that says "What gets measured, gets gamed".  I wish I could find the original source for that quote.

Dysfunction in measurement systems exists because not everything can be measured, and the tasks that are not measured are not rewarded.  Austin points out that when critical tasks are not measured, and therefore neglected, dysfunction results.  I take this further, and believe that the more important a task is, the harder it is to measure.

Measurement has its place, but it cannot replace sound judgments by human beings. This is due to the complexity of human interactions and the fact that organizations are nothing more than collections of human beings interacting with each other.