For anyone who has lead an engineering project or a technical team before, you know how important it is to manage performance. Whether it's widgets per hour, the percentage of work complete, or the number of requirements derived, knowing your project by the numbers is critical to understanding how things are going.
Luckily enough, we as engineers love our numbers. We're more than comfortable making sense of charts and graphs and thinking about the world around us in quantitative terms.
And that is why it's so perplexing to me that technical projects have such trouble with their metrics.
Regardless of what project I work on, regardless of industry, there is a near universal appetite for metrics, and a nearly matched propensity to misuse and abuse metrics.
Today, I'm going to share five common issues I see in professional practice, and how to address them on your projects.