Measurement without consequences

They put one of those speed-monitoring trailers out in front of my house. As a person drives by, his or her speed flashes on a large display, so a driver can see if he or she is speeding. I thought, how cool is this! So I hid in the bushes and watched cars go by. I could tell if a person reacted to the reported speed on the monitor by observing if the brakes were hit or not. About 90% of the drivers who were going at least 10 miles over the speed limit hit the breaks. This machine sat outside my house for about 5 days. Each morning I went out and monitored cars between 6:30 a.m. – 7:30 a.m. Each day fewer and fewer drivers hit the breaks. By the fifth day, the drivers had learned there was no consequence to speeding. Of those driving at least 10 miles per hour over the speed limit, only about 5% hit the breaks. The drivers learned nothing was going to happen to them if they continued to speed.

I was working with a client in Berlin, Germany. He was frustrated because he could not get people to input their time into a centralized time reporting system. I asked, “What are the consequences of not inputting time?” He looked at me and said, “There are no consequences.” I then asked, “What is the reward for inputting time?” And he said, “There are no rewards either.” I pointed out that nothing happens if an employee inputs time and nothing happens if an employee does not input time. I think it is obvious the root cause of not reporting individual time.

I often ask the consequences of not following established procedures and policies, what are the rewards for following procedures and policies? Does an employees performance reviews actually include activities that support the procedures and policies? If a software organization has a team of folks, usually, called QA, trying to implement a process and those processes, are not part of individual’s performance reviews, then the QA team is destined to fail.

Too often those “heroes” get rewarded who do not follow procedures and policies. They were able to overcome the “obstacles,” “the road blocks,” so on and so forth. Everyone knows “road blocks” are code words for the process. It is great a project was delivered in a short time frame or helped a customer, but a look at the end result is needed. Was software created thrown into production, undocumented, making the production software of lower quality? In essence, the situation is worse in the long run, but this behavior was rewarded.