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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

The idea that a company would have 500 meaningful and actionable metrics that would each produce relevant data daily seems laughable.

I've always found that the more time, money, and employee hours a company spent on tracking metrics, the crappier that company was. (My sample size here is admittedly small.)

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I've usually found that when metrics become the focus of an organization, the organization optimizes around gaming the metrics. This happens in companies, volunteer groups, communist dictatorships, capitalist paradises, everywhere.

Something inevitably gives.

I also have a hard time believing that this idea is floating putting a piece of paper on everybody's desks, in 2015.

An investigation of UK, specifically English, education policy and practice over the last decade or so would provide evidence for your position. The thing that gives is time spent in dialogue with individual students.

Paper? We have dashboards. And colour printing is a bit expensive.

I use paper all of the time to present information. It's remarkably effective and easy to do vs. screwing around with dashboard apps, accessing various data sources, etc.

To avoid the horrific costs of printing things on color, I've seen millions wasted on BI tools and other fluffery. 10 minutes of excel and 10 pieces of paper does the job.

That is only a single paper though. Now you must replicate and distribute that paper to every person in the company...ASAP.

The consumer of metrics that I give a hoot about are a few key team members, the COO and CTO. I go to "# of copies" hit 6, and I'm done.

I'm not a total luddite btw, Most of what I do is project based or operations in transition. So metrics are either evolving or we don't have a consensus over what matters. So the building process of automated dashboard isn't a high roi activity.

This is one of the tricks of metrics. They are made to be gamed. So, in picking the metrics to measure, you are picking the game you want your team to play. Trying to cover all metrics is silly, as you context switch between too many things.

If you can't measure what's important, then what you do measure becomes important

What gets measured gets managed. - Peter Drucker.

This idea sounds awesome, but what is this 'printer' or 'paper' that he speaks of? Is that kind of like a paginated web app?

Agreed, it's impossible to make decisions on 500 metrics. The art is focusing on a handful of metrics that matter most.

No one would consider 500 metrics on a regular basis. In the "holacratic" context, however, it might be valuable for the worker to be able to consider different metrics today than she considered last week. It might be difficult to decide ahead of time which metrics will be useful. With too few metrics, that very decision might undermine holacracy.

There's a large difference between having access to metrics/data and an operational dashboard. If an employee is curious or wants to prove a hypothesis, the data can be made available through tools like Chartio, Looker, Periscope, etc. But a dashboard should represent the focus of the business and team. If she is looking at different metrics each week to make decisions, one has to question the integrity of her focus and decision making ability. If you're going to distribute metrics to employees every day, they should represent the current business goals and clearly communicate the businesses progress.

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