Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations

Here's an essential reference for all managers facing the multitude of issues involved in any measurement program. Developed from an award-winning doctoral thesis at Carnegie Mellon University, this is a lucid, captivating analysis of organizational performance measurement. Author Robert D. Austin emphasizes the behavioral aspects of measurement situations. The focus is on people and how they react when they are part of organizational systems that are being measured. Interviews enrich the text, conducted with eight recognized experts in the use of measurement to manage computer software development: David N. Card, of Software Productivity Solutions; Tom DeMarco, of the Atlantic Systems Guild; Capers Jones, of Software Productivity Research; John Musa, of AT&T Bell Laboratories; Daniel J. Paulish, of Siemens Corporate Research; Lawrence H. Putnam, of Quantitative Software Management; E. O. Tilford, Sr., of Fissure; plus the anonymous Expert X. A practical model for analyzing measurement projects solidifies the text -- don't start without it! From the Foreword "...admirable ...We believe this is a book that needs to be on the desk of just about anyone who manages anything." -- Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister From the Preface "Some books on measurement so strongly advocate its use that they look almost exclusively at success stories. They profess to tell you how to get it right but they supply little or no detail about the consequences or likelihood of getting it wrong. Partly this is because stories of management failures are harder to find than accounts of successes, for obvious reasons: People like to claim credit for successes and forget failures. But you can learn a lot from failure. So I've worked to find examples of failure and devoted a significant portion of this book to examining the examples in search of a common pattern...Understanding the pattern of failure can help us avoid it." -- RDA

Review :
." . . Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations will provide you with a background to recognize measurement system dynamics so you can design better measurement systems. . . . Austin gives an in-depth look at what makes or breaks measurement systems. The information is presented in an intuitive way; if you understand algebra and simple logic, you will understand what Austin is presenting." "A book of deep ahas for me has been Robert D. Austin's 1996 book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations. I've read it half a dozen times. The book is something of a sleeper, undramatic and dry (like the title). But by the time it is done, the author has devastated the notion of Management by Objectives and all of its fellow easy-as-pie management methods. If you're measuring anything, you need this book." "Buy Measuring, and use it to balance the points the overly enthusiastic fans of measurement will make in your next project meeting." "When you realize that dysfunction will probably accompany almost any kind of measurement, you're inclined to ask questions like, Why and when is it likely to occur? What are the underlying causes? What are the indicators that it is happening? and, most of all, What can I do about it? Satisfying answers to these and other allied questions were provided by Rob's thesis, but by no other source that we knew of. That made us believe that the work needed to be made available in some more accessible form. We began to encourage and cajole Rob to develop his work into a book. Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations is the admirable result. We believe this is a book that needs to be on the desk of just about anyone who manages anything."