Sunday, June 8, 2014

Interview with Ken Schwaber Part 5

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 didnt 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 arent 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 thats 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 youll 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 thats the hook; thats the trick thats in it. 


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