I saw today on the Triple Bottom Line blog an interesting excerpt where a utility simply started showing customers on their utility bills how they compared to their neighbors and that alone lead to a decrease in energy usage. How awesome is that?
At work, our senior management team has been eager to get “metrics” lately. When pressed, it’s sometimes difficult to get from them exactly what kind of metrics, but we have developed a pretty awesome build package based on a bunch of open source products like CheckStyle, Emma, PMD, and others. We also had a case a year or so ago when one particular user in Japan was responsible for 50% or more of the group’s support calls. Once we had the hard data we were able to go to the manager of the group and say, “look, this guys is costing you x dollars more than anyone else. Maybe you should have a conversation with him…”
So, metrics. They’re easy to dismiss as simply a management fad, but they can have a real positive impact if used well. And a real negative impact if used poorly.