Made2Measure

We’ve all been in situations where we get agitated because someone we admire, and with whom we generally agree, goes too far in pushing his or her agenda. This situation occurred to me as I read Henry Mintzberg’s new book, Managing (Berrett-Koehler, 2009), which updates his thinking in his first book, The Nature of Management (Harper & Row; reprinted by Prentice-Hall, 1973) based on his doctoral dissertation more than 35 years ago. Mintzberg all but dismisses the value of using performance outcome data in favor of an “information diet” of gossip, hearsay, and speculation.” Such “informal information” he writes, “can be much richer, even if less reliable.” I could not believe what I was reading. It goes counter to what I’ve been advocating to court managers for years, i.e., effective performance measurement and management can transform your court; it shows you where you are and gets you to where you want to be. Performance monitoring, analysis and management are no longer an optio...

The launch this month of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 7, marks the end of one era of information technology and the start of another, says the Economist (“Briefing Cloud Computing,” October 17, 2009). Windows is not going to disappear but it will be much less important in the future. Cloud Computing Much of the computing we do today on our computers in our homes and offices will soon be – so to speak - in the “clouds,” and not on our personal computers, where Windows resides today. Instead, desktop computing on personal computers – featuring full-featured database and spreadsheet capabilities – is being replaced by IT architectures that call for the heavy lifting to be performed by external data centers accessible to us over the Internet. Cloud computing is attracting an enormous amount of attention. The term “cloud computing” is a metaphor that originated with IT architects who routinely used cloud shapes to depict the flow of data from unknown external sources inste...

Today's Wall Street Journal printed my letter to the Editor on the value of rankings focused on outcomes, a topic that has occupied this space often: Most “number guys” can criticize performance measures, especially rankings, in their sleep because most measures are imperfect. Carl Bialik (“Ill-Conceived Ranking Makes for Unhealthy Debate,” The Numbers Guy, Oct. 21) takes the easy route for a cheap shot at the dated and flawed World Health Care low 37th ranking of the U.S. in the world in health care. He suggests that the “unhealthy debate” caused by the U.S. ranking would be cured by more methodological rigor and that, in any event, we shouldn’t rank everything, especially health care. I wonder if Mr. Bialik thinks that our debate about health care would be healthier if the U.S. ranked let’s say 12th in the world using methods that pass muster with the scientific community. I suspect that most of us would like to see the U.S. in first place and that even 12th place would not c...

Court systems have concentrated too much authority for continuous improvement at the top where there are good intentions, but relatively few resources and little capacity. Court performance data are delivered too little and too late, if at all. When performance is presented to staff, it is often done so in endless documents stuffed with indecipherable figures and statistics, to make much of a difference. Performance data is a virtual temple secret that only the priests (designated top-management and analysts) can read and interpret. Courts should seek to give all court employees all the performance measurement information they need to make improvements themselves. Courts should tap into the capacities of all court employees to track and analyze performance data and to devise solutions to problems. A similar strategy, referred to as “radical transparency,” was advocated as a road map for economic recovery in a “manifesto” written by Daniel Roth in Wired March 2009: “Instead of assign...

State court leaders and managers take heart! Things could be worse. Much worse! In a widely circulated story last week, Sam Dolnick of the Associated Press (AP) reported that, according to Chief Justice A.P.Shah, the High Court in New Delhi is so behind that it could take up to 466 years (not days or even months, years) to clear its backlog of cases. In a vast understatement, retired Supreme Court Justice J.S. Verma, who is critic of the system, is quoted as saying “I don’t think you would have to wait four centuries to have a case decided.” Reasons cited for the backlog in India include the usual suspects: lack of accountability for results, corruption, inefficiency, and an uneven application of the rule of law favoring the wealthy and well-connected. Another is that India does not have enough sitting judges. "It’s a completely collapsed system,” Prashant Brushan, a well known lawyer in New Delhi, is quoted as saying. “This country only lives under the illusion that there is a ...

State courts are facing severe budget cuts in the current economic crisis. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, at least 44 states are facing shortfalls in their FY 2009 and/or FY 2010 budgets. By most accounts, the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. Some of my more optimistic colleagues (who -- I might add -- are fortunate enough to have solid jobs) subscribe to the “necessity is the mother of invention” school of thought on the deepening recession. They have a point. While they do not wish ill toward their court friends on the receiving end of drastic budget cuts, they see a bright spot in the months and years ahead. They welcome the sense of urgency. They're hoping it will give birth to clarity of focus and innovation. They see courts and state court systems today forced to confront issues and questions that they believe should be asked all the time, not just now: What are our fundamental obligations? What is expected of us? Which pr...

The 2009 U .S. News & World Report second annual rankings of America’s best public high schools came out this week. The rankings were done by School Evaluation Services, a K – 12 education data research firm run by Standard & Poor’s, based on an analysis of the performances of 21,069 public high schools in the 2006 -2007 school year (see www.usnews.com/highschools ). The annual rankings of high schools hold two important lessons for judges and court managers, especially those who bristle at the idea of comparative performance measurement. (See “Ten Reasons Not to Measure Court Performance,” Made2Measure , November 19, 2008) The first lesson is that performance matters to citizens. The U.S. News & World Report rankings are based on the key principle that a great high school must be able to produce measurable academic outcomes to show that it successfully educates all of its students across a range – a balanced scorecard – of performance indicators. Little else matte...

This post is based on a December 9, 2008, presentation to a seminar of Michigan Chief Judges and Court Administrators sponsored by the Michigan Judicial Institute, at the Michigan Hall of Justice Conference Center in Lansing, Michigan. It is an updated and expanded version of the Made2Measure post, Eight Reasons Not to Measure Court Performance , April 5, 2006. It is not sufficient simply to proclaim the benefits of court performance measurement – accountability, transparency, focus, attention, understanding, control, predictability, influence, and strategy development -- and expect acceptance and effective implementation. Performance measurement, like any tool, has shortcomings and introduces disruptions of the status quo that should not be dismissed or ignored. These shortcomings and disruptions can be minimized and even eliminated, however, when they are identified, clearly understood, thoroughly and candidly explored, and addressed in specific terms. Unfortunately, they are o...

Micromanage , v.t., - to manage or control with excessive attention to minor details. The October 21 Made2Measure post ( Employee Engagement: Managing the Millennial Generation in the Workforce ), explored how the employee engagement survey developed by the National Center for State Courts and CourtMetrics, for both trial courts (see CourTools Measure 9 ) and for appellate courts (see Measure 7 at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddc3k4gt_14cpvjn2c2 ), can help court managers engage “millennials” – a new crop of young people in the work force who were born between 1980 and 2001. This post explores how the survey may help to reverse the negative effects of micromanagement. The survey uses a self-administered questionnaire to assess the engagement of the court's workforce and the quality of the relationships among its employees, especially those between managers and subordinates. It asks respondents to rate their agreement with each of 20 statements on a five-point scale from “strong...

Effective performance measures drive success. They are clear, focused, and actionable. They serve both as incentives and practical tools for improvement. Not uncommonly, the act of measurement itself will trigger positive actions. The 20-item court Employee Engagement survey developed by the National Center for State Courts for both trial courts (see Measure 8 of the CourTools ) and for appellate courts (see Measure 7 at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddc3k4gt_14cpvjn2c2 ) is a measure that fits this bill. Employee engagement is a constant challenge for court managers. This challenge is even more daunting for “millennials” – a new crop of young people in the work force who were born between 1980 and 2001. Court managers will need them for succession planning as retiring baby boomers leave their positions. Trouble is that the general perception of the millennial generation seems to be that it has great – and sometimes unreasonable -- expectations. These young workers tend to be more op...

The Montana Supreme Court last month became the first high court and only the second state appellate court (see the Oregon Court of Appeal’s 2007 Bench and Bar Survey ) to survey members of the state’s appellate bar and trial bench about how well they believe the state high court is performing. In the spirit of transparency and accountability, it made a summary of the survey results public almost immediately. As explained by Montana Chief Justice Karla M. Gray in a cover letter posted on the Supreme Court’s website yesterday ( see Montana Bar and Bench Survey Results ), the Court asked nearly 1,000 appellate lawyers, as well as all of Montana’s District Court Judges and the University of Montana Law School teaching faculty, for their thoughts on the Court’s performance. Respondents rated the Court’s performance in areas central to its primary obligations, including whether the Court’s decisions are based on facts and applicable law, whether the Court’s published opinions...

Do management techniques like monitoring performance and setting targets really work? Most managers are convinced, and those who hire them would like to think so. Where's the evidence? The first-of-its kind study by researchers from Stanford, the London School of Economics and the consulting firm McKinsey & Company suggests the answer is yes (see Scott Thrum’s September 8, 2008, Wall Street Journal column “Theory & Practice: The “Same 01” Is Actually Good Enough for Many”). This is good news, especially for performance measurement. Like management in general, performance measurement needs more than anecdote to assure its widespread adoption, especially in the courts community. Unlike management in general, performance measurement and management techniques are not broadly accepted and are still widely viewed as innovative and experimental. The study, including more than 4,600 midsize factories in 12 countries, is based on responses to surveys of plant managers and examinati...

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently made “never events” – so called because they should never happen – a prominent part of its performance measurement and management policy for U.S. hospitals. The concept of “never events” is yet another example of the nation-wide movement to reform health care by performance monitoring, analysis and management (see Pursuing Perfection – A Lesson from Health Care , Made2Measure , November 1, 2006). Starting in October, Medicare will stop reimbursing hospitals for treating device related infections, urinary tract infections, and surgical infections after orthopedic and heart surgery. Why? Because they are “never events” that should never or rarely ever happen. Because there is proof that nearly all of these hospital infections that sicken and kill millions of patients a year are avoidable when hospital nurses and doctors clean their hands, decontaminate medical devices and instruments, and take other relatively simple preventa...

Performance measurement does not cause inefficiencies and poor practices. It just highlights them for improvement. The cost of fixing them should not be counted against the start-up costs of performance measurement and management. This point often gets lost as courts and court systems embark on initiatives to build performance measurement and management systems. If nothing else, this point needs to be reinforced to blunt a favorite argument against performance measurement initiatives – it all takes too much time, effort and money (see Eight Reasons Not to Measure Court Performance , Made2Measure, April 5, 2006). Some things just need to be fixed anyway. For example, as courts consider the required elements of measures like case clearance rate, on-time case processing, and age of pending caseload, they need to define, in no uncertain terms, such things as: (1) what to count and what not to count; (2) how to classify what they count; (3) when to start and stop the clock; (4) when...

Add this big idea to the concepts that underlie modern performance measurement and management: We are seeing the end of traditional research and scientific method – hypotheses testing and experimentation -- as we know it. And performance measurement is there at the right time and place. From Kilobytes to Petabytes Today we’re able to capture, store, and make sense of massive amounts of data. We’ve gone from kilobytes to megabytes, from terabytes to the Petabyte Age. A petabyte is a measure of memory or storage capacity that is 2 to the 50th power bytes, or the equivalent of 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets full of text. Infinite storage or almost no storage necessary. Unlimited processing capacity. Early-warning sensors and measures everywhere sending automatic alerts from intelligent agents. No structured databases necessary. Just petabytes of information flowing through pattern-matching and trend-watching algorithms. It seems we really don’t need hypotheses and the...