Guillermo Ruiz's Blog

The quote that you have read in the title of this post belongs to Plato. Plato was born in 427 BC and died in 347 BC. Therefore, we are talking about a quote that is more than 2400 years. This weekend I read this quote and I started to think about it. What does Plato mean by a "good decision"?  We usually tend to confuse the decision-making process with its outcomes.  When we want to go to dinner with our family, we will say that it was a great decision after the dinner and it depends on how satisfied we feel with the food, the environment, the dinner's price, etc...  In business it's the same, we often make decisions to change or improve our business or products and we evaluate those decisions after we have observed the results.  Therefore, we can say that we often focus on the outcomes of a decision instead of the decision-making process . The decision-making process uses human knowledge and data  (numbers) to decide what could be the best decision.  Let...

Hi all again, In my last post I wrote about what is an actionable metric and what we should consider a vanity metric. I closed the post asking what you think about story points in Agile methodologies. Are they a vanity metric or an actionable metric? Story points are units of measurement that allow expressing an estimate of the total effort that the team will have to make to fully implement a backlog item. It's an abstract and highly subjective concept depending on the person or the team. Therefore, as a unit of measurement, a story point is a metric . I'm not going to question the relevance of the story points. I'm a strong believer of Agile methodologies and story points are a key concept of them. But when we manage one Agile project, we have to be very careful if we don't provide the proper context when we use story points. Therefore, story points by themselves are a vanity metric . Remember the two questions that I presented in the last post that will help us to...

Hi all again, In one of the previous post , I introduced the main attributes that a good metric has to have. One of these properties talks about that metrics have to trigger actions. A metric that doesn't give the chance to perform an action to change your business or your project is not a valid metric. It's what in the Lean Startup framework is known as Vanity Metric .  In other other hand, an Actionable Metric gives you valuable information about how good or bad things are going and, most important thing, enables you to change or do something to improve. At the end, metrics are there to inform, guide and improve your business or project and should help you to make better decisions. Therefore, you have to bear in mind always the following questions when you analyze one metric: How this metric is helping my business? Based on this metric, how can I change my strategy? If you are not able to answer these questions, most likely you have in front of you a vanity metric. Actionabl...

I shouldn't use the expression "vs" in the title of this post. Simply because both terms are complementary each other. When we are collecting metrics as important as numbers (quantitative) are the reason behind (qualitative). So, the right title for this post should be " Quantitative & Qualitative ". How many of you have followed this customer journey when booking a hotel reservation?  First, start with the selection of the place where you want to visit and look for the hotels around that area.  Sort the list of hotels based on the rating of all the entries in the list and choose the ones with the highest rating.  Then review the top positions on the list and see what other customers have said about each hotel.  Finally, according to the evaluation and the comments, you have chosen which is the option that best suits you (without forgetting the prices, of course :-)) At the end, you have taken into account quantitative and qualitative data to choose the hote...

Data, metrics, analytics, KPIs... all these words are referred to the same concept but are not the same. Let's start explaining one by one. For data we can find many meanings: " Facts that can be analyzed or used to gain knowledge or make decisions ", " just information ", " Information in a form suitable for storing and processing by a computer ", etc... Therefore, people and companies are full of data. We don't choose or pick the data. This data can have different priority depending on how is analyzing it. A metric is a quantitative assessment of statistics that describes what is the progress or the success of something. A metric is what you measure . And what you measure is what you manage to. In a software development project, a metric can be the completion of a specific feature. Or, for instance, a business metric will indicate what are the revenues reached in the last quarter. Unlike the data, we can choose the metrics. A KPIs  ( Key Perfor...

Madrid, May 16th 2021 " No metrics, no management ". In my opinion it's quite difficult to manage one company, one program, one project or whatever you have to manage if you don't have data and the proper metrics. Imagine that you want to go from point A to point B. This is something that happens to all of us everyday. You decide what is the best route depending in the distance or the time that it will take. At the end you manage this situation and you make your decision based on the data that you have. This happens everyday in our life. Personal or professional. Therefore, when you're running a company or a project it's critical to understand what is the data that should drive your decisions. Honestly, I don't think that any Manager in a company make decision or take actions only with the intuition. But data are only figures if you don't have the proper context . I will try to explain my self. I will use an example based on football that I think it w...

I start this blog with the purpose of sharing my knowledge that I'm getting after many years working in the IT sector. I will try to bring here topics that I apply in my work in a daily basis. Ideally I'd like to receive feedback and comments that could improve this knowledge or other different points of view. I have to recognize that lately I'm reading a lot of books and documentation about metrics, lean startups, Agile methodology, the application of product creation in business, etc. I'd like to sum-up in this blog the main conclusions that I got. I don't want to forget that I've decided to write in English. I'm pretty sure that this blog will be perfectly understandable for all of you. Thanks to all you for reading this blog.