I really hated this management mantra. I thought it was boring, because it turned the cool Project Manager into an accountant. I thought it was naive, as management is a black art. I was convinced it could not be done, you cannot measure everything. Yeah I know by now I was utterly wrong.
Problem number one within projects is communication. The unclear exchange of information. And this “measuring thing” is exactly a tool that can contribute to solving at least part of the problems.
Photography by Corrieb.
The god-father of this mantra must be Tom Gilb. He is screaming to measure things within software management for decades. The eye opener for me personally, was his emphasis on the use of metrics, expressing e.g. requirements using a scale with a range associated to it. You are not going to use it just to measure and if the subject has the wrong value hit the guy who created it on the head. When I first started out, this was really my impression of how these metrics would be used.
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