Don’t Go Overboard. Keep It Simple Stupid!

Just because you can make pretty charts and pictures for metrics doesn’t mean you need to go haywire. When you are putting metrics together always keep K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) in mind.

When putting any metric together ask yourself these questions:

• What do you want to show/prove?
  • You can make charts for basically anything but only show what you think will actually be of value. There’s tons of data in every organization/project but why would you show data that is not relevant?
• Can you pull the data in a consistent manner?
  • When you are putting a metric together you should plan on being able to reproduce it either daily/weekly, which you won’t want to do by hand all the time. If you implement an automated consistent approach you will be able to have the metric automatically scheduled so the data is more up to date.
• Does the data require manual intervention?
  • Data that requires manual intervention may not be easily reproducible, which will impact your data.
• Can you back up the numbers?
  • Before you publish any metric make sure you can back the numbers up. Verify that the data source is sending the correct feeds, formulas are correct, etc. The last thing you want is to go into a meeting to be told the metrics you put together is wrong.

What questions do you ask yourself when putting metrics together?