Somebody's Law

[original PM]

We currently have a situation where we cannot get marketshare data for certain areas of the country and so there is no local marketing activity going on.

But my argument is that we know what marketing activities have an impact in some areas of the country and as the business is pretty niche then you could with a high percentage of success implement these activities in all areas and you would see a return.

The counter argument is that if you cannot directly measure your marketshare there is no point in doing the local marketing activities.

So in those areas of the country where they can get marketshare figures they are targetted (lets so to obtain 38% marketshare) and as soon as they do they stop the marketing activity and low and behold next time they look they are back to 36% marketshare.

Another example of where KPI's have been used to drive a workstream when in effect that workstream should be part of BAU...

oh well best get back under my rock...

[d000hg]

There's a law that states whenever a performance metric becomes a payment target it loses its value as a metric.

Anyone recognise this? point to a source?
Ta

Joel Spolsky ranted about this IIRC but he didn't mention any kind of law, just that developers will learn how to abuse the system... writing more verbose code to get more lines/day, checking in every save to boost commits, deliberately introducing bugs to increase number fixed, etc.

[Mich the Tester]

Joel Spolsky ranted about this IIRC but he didn't mention any kind of law, just that developers will learn how to abuse the system... writing more verbose code to get more lines/day, checking in every save to boost commits, deliberately introducing bugs to increase number fixed, etc.

Yep; years ago I was on a test team where they gave bonusses for number of issues raised. Effect on quality was disastrous as issues were held back in early phases so they'd lead to bigger problems in later phases of testing.

[IR35 Avoider]

There's a law that states whenever a performance metric becomes a payment target it loses its value as a metric.

Anyone recognise this? point to a source?
Ta

Goodhart's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Goodhart's law, although it can be expressed in many ways, states that once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play that role. The law was named for its developer, Charles Goodhart, a former advisor to the Bank of England and Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics.

The law was first stated in a 1975 paper by Goodhart and gained popularity in the context of the attempt by the United Kingdom government of Margaret Thatcher to conduct monetary policy on the basis of targets for broad and narrow money, but the idea is considerably older. Closely related ideas are known under different names, e.g. Campbell's Law (1976), and the Lucas critique (1976). The law is implicit in the economic idea of rational expectations. While it originated in the context of market responses the Law has profound implications for the selection of high-level targets in organisations.[1]

It has been asserted that the stability of the economic recovery that took place in the United Kingdom under John Major's government from late 1992 onwards was a result of Reverse Goodhart's Law: that, if a government's economic credibility is sufficiently damaged, then its targets are seen as irrelevant and the economic indicators regain their reliability as a guide to policy

[vetran]

nothing wrong with Prince 2 etc, properly implemented.

I used to get a bonus based on Metrics & individual targets as did the rest of business. at the end of the quarter the number of IT calls would go up dramatically because people realised their bonuses were at threat and they had to do something,anything. That normally meant leaning on IT then trying to blame them. Had a few irate managers complaining at me because we had made their staff miss their bonus, I had to show them the call and explain it was 3 hours old. Last week of the quarter was affectionately known as 'get me my bonus week' in IT. However things got done and money was saved.

Now however we get a percentage depending on overall pay and the profitability of the whole EMEA. Something we have no control over.
Now people don't care less. No spike at quarter end.

The difficulty is that either people don't spend the relevant time to do the process properly or are so anal about it they cause people to subvert the system. Any gaming of the system would be 'gross misconduct' so the manager needs to grow a pair and watch carefully. They will only need to publicly flog one developer. Probably the worst one as they won't have the brains to cover their tracks.

[RSoles]

Goodhart eh?
Thanks all.