Tyler Grant shares a short post and quick thought on incentives created by acknowledging certain observations.
An issue I see frequently when it comes to any form of productivity measurement, whether it’s team metrics, KPIs, OKRs, or any other measurement, is the lack of acknowledgement of the incentives created by these observations.
An example I use frequently is when we measure velocity and ask teams to increase their velocity, all you need to do is enter your work tracker of choice, increment all of your story points by one stage and there you go, you’ve increased your velocity!
What leadership is trying to accomplish by focusing on velocity increasing is improving the amount of work complete by the team, but usually what they get is gaming the system.
I’m certainly not advocating for disregarding any and all measurements, but you must consider the second and third order impacts of those choices. If you don’t think about how your teams and organization might react to these measurements, you will not see the improvements you want.