Book rec: How to Measure Anything
I know two things about you:
You care about outcomes, are aiming to accomplish something in the world, and have limited resources.
Succeeding in your work requires measuring: costs, outcomes, and your level of confidence in cost and outcome projections.
If you want to get a better handle on measuring things that matter to your organization, I recommend you pick up a copy of Douglas Hubbard's How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business.
The premise is simple and will probably revolutionize your approach your work, if you give it a chance.
Here's the gist, from the book's opening:
Anything can be measured. If a thing can be observed in any way at all, it lends itself to some type of measurement method. No matter how “fuzzy” the measurement is, it’s still a measurement if it tells you more than you knew before. And those very things most likely to be seen as immeasurable are, virtually always, solved by relatively simple measurement methods.
Hubbard doesn't pull punches when it's time to dig in on the numbers, so you'll either wade through or skip over technical discussions of Excel spreadsheets, statistical analysis, Monte Carlo simulations, and the like.
But in between, you'll learn fascinating concepts about measurement and observability, including Hubbard's well-supported assertion, based on years of experience consulting on complex projects, that:
1. Your problem is not as unique as you think.
2. You have more data than you think.
3. You need less data than you think.
4. An adequate amount of new data is more accessible than you think.
If you're not ready to dig into the whole book, maybe start with one or both of these excellent summaries:
From This is Important: The Concepts Behind the Book: How to Measure Anything
From LessWrong: How to Measure Anything
Here's the thing:
Most measurements are mere approximations. I'm not exactly 5 feet 10 inches tall. But in almost every case, that's more than close enough.
It's easy to think that some things can't be measured. That if we don't know it now, or can't I know it exactly, then it can't be measured usefully.
But with the concepts and techniques that Hubbard describes, you'll see it's a lot easier than you think.
All the best,
A.