Joel writes about an email he received from a consultant:
I didn’t understand a thing he wrote. The email contained a lot of words (“benchmarking,†“outside in,†“performance metrics,†“best practice,†“process and organizationâ€) each of which set off a loud buzzing alarm-like sound in my head. The noise from the buzzing was so loud and so distracting that I found myself completely unable to parse the email.
When consulting is all about metrics and how to perform better in regard to this metrics, you only do optimize the processes (and with it the human actions) to achieve better metrics. Nothing else.
Tom DeMarco once said You can’t control what you can’t measure
. And it is not possible to measure and control human actions, if they are not completely supervised.
In Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations Robert D. Austin writes about this issue.
