Truisms about metrics and measurement

Sometimes the unfortunate truth has to be told. And I have been assigned to tell it to the clueless project manager of the project to which I am currently assigned. He’s from the “just-post-something-on-the-intranet-twice-a-week-no-matter-what-it-is” school of communication (a fine school where they apparently hand out Ph.D.s in public communication theory and practice just because you know how to find a word-processing program on a personal computer).

In an upcoming meeting, I will have to tell him that the dumping-twice-monthly-and-running practice will not work. I even have the backing of my management on this. In trying to figure out how to drop this happy bomb, it got me musing on communication metrics and measurement (which is more important to this project manager than the actual communication). There are a few things that are always true about measuring what we do. Here they are: