Commonly attributed to Peter Drucker a cornerstone of management is "If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it." (which according to the Drucker Institute he never said).

It's a Damned anyhow situation. In my oberservation KPIs are plagued by linear thinking and, what I call Gamability. Let me explain

Meet the feedback loop

We are caught in a "newtonish" world of belief that there is a linear relationship between a cause and effect. Most notably visible in post mortem demand for a root cause analysis (At least science gives ceteris paribus a thougth).

In his book The Fifth Discipline the author Peter M. Senge offers a different view and model. Most system, from small atomic particles to the Universe are bound in a series of feedback loops. The emphasis here is on loops -> plural. The various execution speeds lead to observable results, that can't be explained with single linear thinking.

Let's take a sweet example, that should be easy to relate:

You don't feel happy, so you eat your favorite food. Now your happy. Two (obviously simplified) feedback loops kick off. The red lines indicate that the loops work with a delay.

The upper one removes the "favorite" from the food, while the lower one removes the hapiness inducing effect. Pretty obvious and as I said grossly simplified.

In a recent chat a store manager shared how tedious the annual physical stock taking is, since the company doesn't provide handheld barcode scanners. Why not use your phone I replied. So after a short discussion it was agreed to build a MVP.

The geek corner of my brain went into overdrive: databases, authentication, protocols, libraries - the whole shebang. If you don't reign into that, you end up with the famous "swing design"

(shamelessly borrowed from here)

Luckily there's the agile way: add value incrementally. Our increment frequency was one improvement per 15min, tiny step by step ;-).

The result is POPIAH: Poor Operator's Personal Inventory Assessment Helper (not that one). The final (for now - pending making it pretty) result looks like this:

Step by step

Our epics (defined looking back) were:

• make scanning work
• make the screen useful
• allow using the data elsewhere