Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #577792 in Books
• Published on: 1996-11-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 216 pages

Synopsis
An analysis of organizational performance measurement, focusing on how people react to measurement systems, for managers and project staff creating a program for managing organization performance. Compares successful and unsuccessful programs, provides examples in fields such as drama, economics, an

Customer Reviews

useful and original insights
This book explores measurement dysfunction - why it doesn't work as expected. And, usefully, takes the measurement of software development as focus because it is encapsulates so many of the issues of performance measurement. Austin develops a model for reasoning about measurement and uses this to look at performance measurement's fragility and the motivations of the measured, the measurers and the experts. It describes how performance measurement is treated in different cultures and suggests where the value of measurement really lays. This book will disturb and provoke those involved in software measurement, especially consultants. It is all the more disturbing because it convincingly makes clear the reasons behind so many of the software measurement problems we encounter.

Important message delivered well
How should you work round the conflicts of interest that arise whenever one person works for somebody else? I was very keen to read this having personally seen failure after failure as carefully designed measurement systems just made people focus on cheating the system.

Robert Austin provides a careful and detailed analysis of why performance targets cause problems. Unfortunately in describing what doesn't work - and why it can never work - it is difficult to see what we should use to replace metrics. I guess that is for other books to answer.

Compared to other management texts this is pleasantly light on jargon. Simultaneously it has more content than many thicker books. As such it is a pleasure to read and you don't finish feeling that you could have learnt just as much in half the time.

Highly recommended.