Part 5:
Evidence Based Managment
Coming this spring, Better Software magazine will publish an
interview with Ken Schwaber that I conducted.
As part of my blog, I will publish a number of excerpts. Here is part 5 of 5, the last in the series. Enjoy.
KS - I think some managers are not going to welcome this approach
because they are only responsible for explaining why projects didn’t deliver on time and being able
to blame someone else. This is going to be really, really scary to a good
number of managers who aren’t
very confident in what they do.
I think that when they all start looking at the metrics and start
seeing what is really happening, it is going to be pretty interesting. One of
the sneaky things in EBM and the agility path is the agility index (a rollup of
the metrics). This is the easiest metric
to compare (between organizations)
as a trend within your organization and that’s pretty scary right there.
We also gather more data for comparisons between like organizations in
the same industry sector. All you need
to do is put out a report out with inter-corporate metrics and have it show up
in Forester and Gartner and other newspapers and you’ll start seeing a lot of interesting
discussions.
The idea is appealing however once you start using it and it
starts coming back on you that you have to do something to improve the
organization. And for EBM that’s the hook; that’s the trick that’s in it.
