The importance of measurement: no metrics, no management

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 will be easy to understand: today Spanish football league has been played and there's only one match left to finish the championship. .

What would you think if I tell you that the striker of your favorite team has done 20 goals this season? Probably you will think that it was worthy the amount of money that the club paid for him.

But what would you think if I tell you that all the goals (20) has been done via penalty? Most likely you will start to think that the investment was not bad but not as good as you thought when you only knew that he did 20 goals. At least, a conclusion could be that he's good kicking penalties. 

But what would you think if I tell you that he kicked 100 penalties during the season and he only made 20 goals? With all this information and context you will probably think that it was a bad investment and next season your team has to make a better decision.

With these examples I wanted to share how important are the metrics in our life, taking into account that data and metrics are in all of our biggest decisions but how important is as well the context of each metric.

In the next post in this blog, I will explain what are the main metrics that I've used in my work.

Thanks.

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