What are your Metrics for?

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Every looked at your metrics, and wondered “WhyTF am I actually tracking these things”? Well yeah, there are a whole bunch of obvious “Technology” metrics — you know, the things you use to track failures, latencies, and so forth. This question has more to do with your “Process” metrics — where you are measuring things like burn-down, open tickets, time to resolution, etc.
The thing is, some of these are easy to measure, and some of them require quite a bit of work just so you can get to a place where you can start tracking them. However, all of these are pointless if you can’t directly tie them to decisions! Think of it this way — if the decisions are orthogonal to the metrics (“we’re going to fire Alice regardless of what the burn-down rate is”), then why even bother tracking the metric?
It’s a really simple question to ask, and one that can be surprisingly difficult to answer — What are the thing that you would do more of, do less of, add, remove, spend more money on, or spend less money(•) based upon the metrics that you want to gather? Internalize the above, and make sure that you have the answer before going down the rabbit hole!
(•) From John Cutler’s article on Measurement Malpractice at https://goo.gl/EZmmUU

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