The talk around the agile community of The Oath of Non-Allegiance, got me thinking about the general question of how to deal with new ideas. There is nearly an endless source of ideas in any organization. Either internally generated or externally acquired.
The challenge is how to sort through all these ideas in the presence of a project environment. This means bounded scope, bounded time, and bounded deliverables. And bounded attention span for all the participants.
Measures of Effectiveness (MoE)
Measures of Effectiveness are intended to provide constructive, definitive indicators of performance. For example MoE's for operations might read like:
Are the users ...
- ... getting the support they need when and where they need it?
- ... "in charge" and able to control their assets to perform the needed work?
- ... getting support without having to worry about it any more that worrying about the support they are getting for other initiative?
So For Alistair's Oath
I promise not to exclude from consideration any idea based on its source, but to consider ideas across schools and heritages in order to find the ones that best suit the current situation.
What are the Measures of Effectiveness (MoE) for this, where ...
- Measures of Effectiveness (MoE) represent the customer view, usually annotated and of qualitative nature. They describe the customers’ expectations of a product, project or system; the voice of the customer.
- Measures of Effectiveness (MoEs) are quantitative measures that give some insight into how effectively a idea, suggestion, process or method is, should, or could be performing.
Along with the MoEs come Measures of Performance (MoP)
- Measures of Performance (MoP) are the corresponding view of the engineer; a technical specification for a product. Typically Measures for Performance are quantitative and consist of a range of values about a desired point. These values are what an engineer targets when designing the product, by changing shape, materials and manufacturing process, so as to finally achieve the qualities desired by the customer.
What's the Point?
When we suggest something, like let's all take this oath, how can we tell that doing so has any effectiveness what so ever? What's the point of doing something if you can't tell it's going to result in some beneficial outcome? To someone, anyone? Why Bother?
