MeasurementDistortion

What systems are you required to feed that seem to invite distortion?

My favorite -- time and attendance reporting

If I feed it the "wrong" data, my report gets flagged, the rolled up report for my manager gets flagged and her manager's roll up gets flagged... It's easier for me to feed the system what it expects rather than sharing the facts.

I don't know whether I'm lying because I tell my manager that I am lying. I wonder what Sister Mary Stella, my first grade teacher (nun) would say about that. Don't tell her. I'm sure she wouldn't like it.

SteveSmith 2005.03.14

"I don't know whether I'm lying because I tell my manager that I am lying."

Reminds me of the Meatloaf song "I'd lie for you and that's the truth." DonGray 2005.03.15

"Lie to me. I promise, I'll believe." - from "Strong Enough" by Sheryl Crow. Seems to be the "happy status theme song", popular a great many places.

At one point, a client of mine was building an embedded device - a piece of ruggidized electronics hosting their software so it can be deployed in hostile enviornments. They didn't have a spec or a test plan for their BIOS, their OS, their hardware, their system as a whole, the version of their custom software which would go on this platform, the manufacturing test software they would provide their manufacturer, or, actually the layered software (the part that contains all of their intellectual property) they were going to put on this thing. Yet they were ready to go "beta" and about do be "done." They had hours-long status meetings several times a week, talking about how done this was.

Whole room full of people going: "Lie to me. I promise, I'll believe." Not the first time I've seen it.

-- JimBullock 2005.03.15

Funnily enough, my favourite is the same as Steve's. We're currently implementing Planview, and started with time reporting rather than with getting Project and Programme Managers to plan projects properly. I thought the clue was in the name of the product, but I guess the clue wasn't obvious enough. Net result, we have project plans with 5 tasks on them, and people attempting to record time spent against those high level tasks (e.g. "Define") and where the project isn't setup, they put their time to Admin. Now, the net result we want to see if loads of people working on projects, but what we'll actually see if that we hardly do any projects at all and people are spending all their time filling in forms. Both are fairly major distortions!

PhilStubbington 2005.03.16

Okay, let's look at this in a more general way. People lie when they perceive some advantage in it. I can see that easily with the time reporting--if they're getting overtime, they can even make more money that way, though I suspect that's not the most common cause. More likely, it's ... what?

But this lying about status of a whole project, what in the world do they think they're getting out of that? That it will magically come together if they lie hard enough? Long enough?

Wouldn't it do wonders for project management if we all had Pinocchio noses? But you know, there are ways to tell if people are lying--but only if you want to know. . - JerryWeinberg 2005.03.19

I have seen people lie about project status to buy time. You keep bugging me about something, I am sick of you and sick of this project, I am looking for a new job elsewhere. So, I tell you things are fine knowing that you won't learn the truth for a few weeks. By that time, I will have found a new job.

I would like to know how to tell if people are lying. Jerry?

DwaynePhillips 20 March 2005

Wouldn't you now! But if I told you, how would you know I was telling the truth? :)

Seriously (do I really mean that?), there are many ways. One way by itself may not be surefire, but as you combine ways, you get more and more certain. And, then, you can check it out.

Some examples:

- Look into Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP). Lots of stuff about eye movements, for example.
- Study police interrogation techniques. For example, listen to whether the person actually answers the questions you put. (Q: "Did you kill her?" A: "I've never done anything wrong."
- Listen and watch for leakage in their speech and body movements--basically, incongruence.
- Just let them keep talking on open-ended questions. If they talk long enough, they'll contradict themselves.
- Color changes in the skin. You have to practice this one. Perhaps at AYE I'll demonstrate.

That's a sample. I'm not going to give everything away, am I?

I'm going back to Steve's original question: What systems are you required to feed that seem to invite distortion?

The worst case I saw was during an assessment. I was brought in because management thought the testers were too stupid, and they needed to hire all new ones (a few hundred people). Their reason? The testers couldn't complete their work on time, even though the rest of the project never missed a milestone. I was a little (!) suspicious that on their year-long projects of several hundred people, the testers were the only ones who missed deadlines, but I supposed it could happen.

As I asked questions in the assessment, I realized that the testers were the only ones who'd actually met any deadlines. The developers regularly didn't complete their work, inserting stubs and leaving code incomplete/untested, in order to say they'd met their deadlines. Because the project managers only measured the date and not the actual value delivered, the PMs thought the developers had met their deadlines. But at some point, the product had to work -- in system test.

When I presented my data, the senior management team refused to believe it as a team. However, when I spoke with managers individually, they could believe it.

There are two distortions here: what the PMs measured (just date, not value), and the inability of the managers to face the truth and take action. -- JohannaRothman 2005.03.31

I've seen precisely this phenomenon--and enough times that I know immediately what's happening when they say the testers are not making their schedules. The problem is, as JR points out, convincing management of what's really going on. This is only possible if you insist on visiblity early and often. At the end, it's too late. This happens to the testers because they're sitting on the ground floor of an N-story outhouse, and crap only falls in one direction. - JerryWeinberg 2005..03.30

Several years ago, I had the related problem of trying to force visibility on a late project from the inside. We were struggling along in a project end-game, with the claim being floated that we would ship in 2 weeks. I leaned two big whiteboards against a cubicle in the hall that got the most traffic and put up a sort of burn-sideways chart using post-its. The chart showed pretty clearly that we had another 2 months of work left, and left open the option of deferring work, though Marketing never did take us up on the offer. Our CEO would walk down that hall looking straight ahead, instead of his normal style of poking his head in to see how things were going. Watching him was funny in a sad-funny sort of way. --DaveSmith 2005.03.31

Updated: Thursday, March 31, 2005