Two Great Quotes on IT Measurement

I’m getting ready to send out our August Balanced Scorecard Operational Review deck to our IT organization today. It got me to thinking about a couple of my favorite quotes that I wish other parts of the organization would use to manage their teams. The first quote is on the first page of every monthly scorecard. If I could force people to sleep with this quote under their pillow at night I would.

“Trying to improve something when you don’t have a means of measurement and performance standards is like setting out on a cross-country trip in a car without a fuel gauge. You can make calculated guesses and assumptions based on experience and observations, but without hard data, conclusions are based on insufficient evidence.”

Mikel Harry, an author of a good book on “Six Sigma.”

We can definitely debate the impact Six Sigma has had on corporations but the quote is fantastic. His book is the origin of my phrase “we are a facts based, math based organization” that I try to instill into the team. His second quote that I love states that “you don’t truly understand a problem until you can express it mathematically.” Both good quotes and I definitely agree with them. Without facts, my nine year old daughter expressed it best when she said “Opinions are like armpits. Everyone has them and sometimes they are smelly.”As she gets older she will change the wording slightly but the message and its meaning will still stay the same.