“You cannot improve what is not controlled; you cannot control what is not measured; you cannot measure what is not defined ”.
These are the famous words of the American statistician, university professor, author of texts, consultant and main disseminator of the concept of total quality, William Edwards Deming (1900 - 1993).
Words that many have taken lightly and are given the task of defining indicators everywhere, yes, they try to measure anything in order to measure, without understanding that if we measure wrong things, we will promote incorrect behavior on the part of the people affected by said measurement.
A significant batch of people in the organization suffers daily from indicators that were not properly analyzed and formulated, many of them even with incorrect parameters. Just as an example, any similarity with reality is pure coincidence, measuring the arrival time and the departure time.
My dear Manager, open your eyes and especially your mind, measuring how many hours someone works encourages team members to manage with the clock, and in the end you will succeed, you will see how your team will work "apparently" more hours, but studies They demonstrate that working longer hours does not necessarily produce better results. In most cases, it negatively impacts the quality of the work to be obtained; but you have an indicator and it was measured, interesting right?
The wrong definition of an indicator, the poor selection of parameters, in short, its sports management, has a negative impact on the psychological climate that impacts, transcends and extends to the entire organization. And so, far from improving and optimizing our processes, we will obtain the opposite effect; incorrect measurement does more damage than you think.
From my point of view, the secret is to define the concept of Success well, that is, we do not necessarily all use the same meaning of the term, therefore, it is necessary to build a unique vision. It is essential to seek the consensus of the entire team for mutual benefit, success.
The objective is not to look for the quantity, rather, it is to look for the quality of the indicators to be measured and, on the other hand, the same indicator should not always be used (we are animals of customs); An indicator is a tool that allows us to measure the effectiveness (effectiveness + efficiency) of the actions undertaken in order to solve a problem. Indeed, an indicator is born and fades along with the problem, it cannot and should not have an indicator for centuries and centuries, amen. Be careful, the peremptoriness of an indicator says much more than you think, just as an example: what happened to monitoring? Is the indicator really measuring what we want to measure? Are we all, in unison, working in favor of the indicator? How is the sense of belonging? How is the level of leadership?What is going wrong at the management and leadership level?
Now, if the problem that triggered the indicator is resolved, there is no point in continuing with the same indicator. If the problem is not resolved, obviously we are not using the correct indicator or we are misusing it.
After analyzing a considerably large number of Indicators, we found that these are divided into two large groups, Results Indicators and Performance Indicators.
The first ones tell us what happened (past, autopsies) and the second ones, tell us what is happening (present, biopsy) in order to take the necessary actions, in order to improve and optimize the results.
Without underestimating or downplaying the Outcome Indicators, the Performance Indicators or Inductors, also known as Management Indicators, represent the key piece for achieving Success.
Let's see an example that will allow us to highlight and better understand the importance of Inductors, for this we take a Result Indicator such as "Number of failures occurred in a month", by the way, this is a very useful indicator to monitor the quality of the service we are providing.
In this way, as the faults occur, we update the database and at the end of the month we will have a result and with it, we will analyze what happened (past) and we will try to carry out the possible corrective measures in the case.
Now, ignoring all the peculiarities associated with this service and only by way of example, it would be interesting to have indicators associated with Predictive and Preventive maintenance (inductors) since these would greatly contribute to improving the numbers from the Results Indicator stated above.
On the other hand it is very common use, the fallacy of a pair of indicators to measure the TOTAL performance of a worker, this reminds me of the American mechanical engineer and economist Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 - 1915) of the beginning of the last century and his organization scientific work. My dear reader, if we wanted to measure the TOTAL performance of a worker we would need an immensely large number of indicators, a truly titanic task not to say impossible since we should place on the table each and every one of the variables that directly and indirectly affect the behavior of that human being that we want to measure coldly with indicators. An indicator allows me to evaluate a very, very specific aspect associated with a technical problem that you want to solve, in no time,Thanks to this indicator, we will be able to evaluate, the attitude, the aptitude, the environment, the psychological situation, the influence of leadership, motivation, teamwork, the sense of belonging, the influence of culture, the idiosyncrasy of organization, etc., etc., etc.
On the other hand, do not make the capital mistake of associating the indicator with a possible monetary bonus because the shot will easily go through the butt and you will hardly be able to get out of the jam.
