One way to measure the performance of a person or organisation is to look at "measurable deliverables", e.g. how many goals does a football striker scores? Unfortunately, not everything is measurable; e.g. how much does that striker help the rest of the team? No matter how carefully one defines measurable deliverables, they do not tell the full story of a product or a service. Once measurable deliverables are defined, services that cannot be measured tend to be ignored. When everybody pays attention to nothing but measurable deliverables that partially measure performance, these deliverables could become miserable deliverables.
How would a manager assess the performance of an employee? One possibility is to look at "measurable deliverables". For example, a football club could measure the performance of a team by the number of trophies that they win. A football manager could measure the performance of a forward by how many goads he/she scores. In a factory, the number of gadgets that the employee produces per hour is measurable. Such deliverables are tangible and measurable. They are objective measures of an employee's performance, which could be very useful.
Being able to reduce every person or organisation into a number is great. Unfortunately, not every valuable output is measurable. Counting the goals that a football striker scores is easy. But does he/she create changes for other players? Does he/she help in defence? Does he/she encourage other players? Counting the number of students graduated by a university is easy, but measuring the quality of students is less straight-forward. Counting the number of papers written by a scholar is easy, but measuring the quality of those papers is sometimes difficult.
Does morale matter? If it does, then can we design deliverables to measure morale?
It is hard to think of any deliverable that could fully measure the level of morale in an organization. A truely motivated staff would think for the organization, think of ways to improve efficiency, look for opportunities for the organization, etc. It is relatively easy to measure whether a staff achieves goals that he/she is asked to acheive. It is much harder to measure what the staff does not do.
If not careful, measuring deliverables could damage morale. It is hard to measure how much a staff cares. Therefore, the actual cost of implementing measurable deliverables is often unknown to an organization.
When a manager starts to define measurable deliverables, he/she would typically understand that such deliverables are only partial measures. Unfortunately, such understanding tend to get forgotten over time. Very often, those partial measures become the whole in the end. This will happen especially when both managers and subordinates pay full attention to the measurable deliverables -- they are what everyone discusses about and plans around.
In research, the main goal is creating knowledge. It is useful to write down what one has discovered, because otherwise no one would know. When a paper is written, publishing it is a highly rated journal is useful, because papers in those journals tend to be reviewed more rigorously. Besides, they tend to be read by more people (though this is not necessarily true). The number of papers cite a particular paper might serve as an indication of whether this paper is influential. However, this can be gamed -- a group of authors may cite each others' paper in order to boost their citation rates. When citation is a significant measure, authors will play this game. When the number of papers published is a significant measure, some authors may slice the material of one paper and publish them in multiple papers (these are sometimes referred to as salami publications). Funding helps to facilitate research. However, if the amount of funding is used to measure the performance of a scholar (which is like measuring the performance of a car by the amount of fuel that it consumes), then one could see scholars spending a substantial amount of time to seek funding, which means spending substantially less time on research.
It is rather difficult to define deliverables to accurately measure the amount of knowledge created by scholars. All measures are partial. But if everybody is contended to play the game, it is easy to allow these partial measures to define the activities of scholars.
When partial performance measures become the only measures of performance, activities within an organization or community will change accordingly. In some cases, those measurable deliverable could do a lot of damages to the organization or community. Before the management adopts any measurable deliverables, it would be useful to first examine whether they would distract people from the activities that they want to encourage. For example, in defining measurable deliverables for research, it would be useful to check how scholars such as Isaac Newton and Wittgenstein would perform. If not, then shouldn't we worry about such measures eliminating these scholars from the community?
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Related: REF as a destructive exercise
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