Nobody who creates actual products or does actual useful work cares about KPIs. I’ve never heard of a KPI helping someone at the coal face do anything that matters. If you measured eyerolls per mention of KPIs, it would be equal to about half of the number of ears that heard that mention.
Do you feel surprised or annoyed by what I am saying? Then I predict you are either not a craftsman who creates technology, or you are a kind of craftsman I have not yet encountered in my decades in the software industry.
I just facilitated a meeting to examine process improvement needs for a medium sized software company. The number of mentions of KPIs in that meeting? Zero. What we did talk about was problems and potential solutions to problems.
Yet a colleague of mine recently encountered a potential client who asked him point blank what sort of KPIs he recommended for managing a software testing effort. He didn’t like the answer. The answer was: none, nothing, snap out of it… the very idea of reducing your organization to a game of managing simplistic metrics is anathema to excellence.
You want to manage your company? Listen to people. Observe the work. Create an environment where people feel that being honest and open with you brings them success. Hire people you respect, then show them respect.
Actually, that is only true for small-to-mid-sized companies. KPIs are tools for large corporations with multiple teams, just like OKRs and other metric frameworks.
[James’ Reply: Of course it’s a tool for big companies. It’s a dysfunctional tool for which I’ve never heard any worker express respect. If you are a worker and you respect KPIs, I’d like to hear some details about why.]
I have worked at both KPI driven teams and in those without the structure. At the company where KPIs weren’t used, some teams thrived by focusing on problems and solutions, and were guided by thoughtful, effective leaders. However, one of the teams was run by a leader who focused chaotically on immediate tasks, without any clear plan for the week or long term. It was always strictly day-to-day. In this scenario, clear KPIs would have helped the team against an inefficient leader who was wasting everyone’s time.
[James’s Reply: A better way to do that is to get rid of bad leaders. I don’t see how incompetence is overcome by some simplistic metric. Besides, if an organization is so broken it can’t detect incompetent leadership, why should we think it’s any good at selecting metrics?]
I am roughly 25 years into my journey as a test manager / lead tester / test team lead / tester. I have NEVER seen a useful KPI for a team, other than some sort of assessment for the level of team satisfaction in their work – and even that KPI is only marginally useful, and only in very high trust environments which don’t really need it anyway.
– KPI’s usually fall over because they lack construct validity. You probably aren’t measuring what you think you are
– Bad KPI’s drive bad behaviour. So good people IGNORE them almost all of the time.