Dr. Edward Deming often said, ???We need to drive
Stephens
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of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.
fear out of the workplace???, but most performance measurement systems do exactly the
opposite. When management does act on a metric, they do not always look at the business
process. Instead, they focus on someone, some other department, or some outside factor
to ???blame???, causing people to play the system and to point their fingers elsewhere when
problems arise. Many times the metrics selected are too high-level to provide information
where someone can take action to address problems before they develop. In other cases, an
important result gets looked at, but it is impacted by so many variables that it is difficult to
determine the degree of correlation. For example, is a three percent decrease in the rate of
content due to improvements in the process or variability in the measurement system? The
metrics show a result, but it may be too late to take any corrective action, which leads us to
understand that by the time a problem is discovered, it is too late to do anything about it.
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