Metrics: Focus on the Future or the Past?

Are Metrics Based in the Future or the Past?

When you hear the word “metrics” what do you think of? Measurement of results and outcomes of a process? Or do you think of metrics tied to strategic initiatives with future outcomes?

Your perception of metrics as future or past based will have a lot to do with how you use metrics and what you can get out of them.

A good example of this distinction is the way that W. Edwards Deming approached quality management. One of Deming’s “Fourteen Points for Management” as described in his book Out of the Crisis (p. 23-24), was that companies need to “cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.” Thus, Deming’s approach was not to use metrics in the past (dependence on inspection), but rather in the future (building quality into the product in the first place.)

Metrics is at its most powerful when it is coupled with the strategic planning process. Ultimately it becomes cyclical so that it drives process in the beginning of a change and then measures results as they become available. Organizations then practice continuous process improvement by taking the resulting metrics into account when fine tuning their strategic plans, until ultimately the desired results are achieved.