Published in the Service Management Paper of May 27th, 2015

Everyone knows metrics measure things. What most do not understand are the dirty little truths about metrics — what gets measured is what gets done, and metrics drive both good and bad behavior. Put another way, people do what you pay them to do.

The IT Infrastructure Library™ or ITIL® mentions metrics frequently — Critical Success Factors (CSF) and Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

The lesson is simple — metrics must derive from, and align with, business goals and strategies. Metric selection should occur only after understanding the needs the metric addresses.

However, most managers do it backwards. They have metrics they want to see, and design processes around them. This is usually a sure path to failure. This common problem is not unique to IT, and examples of misguided metrics abound inside and outside of IT.

— The remainder of this article can be found here

This is a link to an article from the daily Service Management Paper. This paper is published through an automatic process every day. On this site I start collecting the articles that are of interest as a way to archive the papers