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Operating model

Why the board shows the numbers that make us look worse

·3 min read

Our board reports that 43% of work was later redone, that 12.1% of spend went on rework, and that queueing time rose sharply as parallelism increased. None of those are good numbers. All of them are on the board a client sees, because it is the same board we run on — there is no internal version.

The alternative is an instrument you cannot trust

The moment a metric exists to be presented rather than to be read, it stops being useful for steering. Everyone involved knows which numbers are for management and which are real, and the real ones migrate into private spreadsheets.

A board that can only show good news tells you nothing on the day something goes wrong — which is the only day you urgently needed it.

It also sets the terms of the relationship

If we show you a bad reading before you ask, the good readings become worth something. If every number we publish flatters us, you are right to discount all of them, and you would have no way to tell which ones deserved it.

This is not a claim to unusual virtue. It is the cheaper option: maintaining two versions of the truth costs more than publishing one.

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