Your executive’s mental model is very limited and he (probably) believes that his current model works well enough that he does not need a new one. Of course, he is wrong and you are right. I would put this to him as follows.

If we follow your hypothesis that disciplined learning is not important to your organization, we will subsequently decide that 1) people are disposable and 2) whenever we need a new capability, we will hire it instead of training it. While this approach seems ok it has some interesting consequences in the long term health of the organization.
– we will always be second to the market
– our business domain is easy to learn so our
produces will be commoditized (low margin)
– we will rarely invent things
– only marketing counts
– we give away our business knowledge when people leave

you have asked a heavy weight question – really!

I would suggest five classes of metrics, namely, Quality Metrics, Productivity Metrics, Schedule Metrics, Effort Metrics and Requirements Stability Metrics. Another class of metrics that I advocate are Process Performance Metrics for process improvement purposes. These have to be mapped to the organization for which we are defining the metrics. Additionally, more metrics may be defined that are specific to the organization.

The objective of measurement and metrics is to facilitate the organization to be able to quantitatively manage the organization and achieve the results desired.

Hope this clarifies

Best wishes for your success

Murali Chemuturi

Very educative. The questions that come to my mind are:
How to decide which metrics to use? By conencus?By forcing/enforcing?
How to combine volume and value ? Does value also include profit?
To what extent does the concept of Balanced Scorecard answer this dilemma?

Rgds.Waknis.09-05-2008