It dominated my professional life 25 years ago, but these days I have to remind myself it even exists.
Vestigial remains from my boxes and arrows days when I wore the big pointy hat and shiny cap of a lead architect.
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Ha! Behold my UML metamodel for the Balanced Scorecard! And all the business modeling and enterprise architecture stuff. Those were the days!
(For those of you thinking goal-directed/driven software engineering is a new thing... It's an 80s thing)
https://www.codemanship.co.uk/parlezuml/e-books/umlformanagers/umlformanagers_ch4.pdf
In the early 00s, I used to run strategy & performance measurement design sessions with customers and dev teams. I had a workshop where we'd split into groups and "red team" the metrics other groups designed and iterate them
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Balancing measures is a good way to make them much harder to game, BTW. Pre-gaming them during design is also a good idea.
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@[email protected] The lack of pre-gaming always confuses me. I feel like 90% of commercial performance metrics could be elimanated by just running through the checklist of:
- could somebody spend money to make this number go up?
- would spending money that way improve something about the business or increase its profits?
For a lot of common measures the answers are "yes" and "no", which makes you wonder a bit about business culture.
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@mavnn The classic "All patients must be seen within 3 days of asking for an appointment"
solution: appointments can't be made more than 3 days ahead
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@mavnn The other thing I see very often is goals that require the ones setting the goal to meet certain obligations (preconditions), which are never acknowledged. Failure's guaranteed.
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@[email protected] Indeed. I still remember an NHS manager trying to apply penalty clauses to my brother's start up for not delivering a piece of software, and being disappointed when he received legal advice telling him that it might be hard as he hadn't actually provided them with the specification of what he wanted yet.
@mavnn The classic "All patients must be seen within 3 days of asking for an appointment"
solution: appoints can't be made more than 3 days ahead
@mavnn The classic "All patients must be seen within 3 days of asking for an appointment"
solution: appoints can't be made more than 3 days ahead
