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.

Instead, the use of metrics can be used to manage expectations, to help formulated key users their requirements, and to facilitate decision making. Gilb created a structure, Planguage, to express the requirements to process and product in. Every element has a metric associated with it; you define what the scale is, how you are going to measure it, what the past, current and desired values within the metric are.

Tom’s son, Kai, has taken this approach towards Project Management, and has written a document about the use of Planguage in his EVO project management method. There is no real shortcut in getting the real power of its use, so I recommend to read the entire manuscript during the weekend or during the evenings of your next business trip. If you just have to get a real fast introduction you can read Kai’s paper Agile. Now What?

If You Can Not Measure It, You Can Not Manage It is a post from: Project Shrink.