Management guru Peter Drucker once said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” But what should Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) organisations be measuring? Should everything be measured even if its usefulness is not yet apparent? Or should it be more selective?
Introduction
At a recent industry conference, one presenter explained how they measured software usage to improve operational effectiveness. Unlike timesheets, which are notoriously inaccurate, as we’ll see, the software could give you an accurate breakdown of how many hours staff were active, in which software, and even which commands were most frequently used. The breakdown was presented visually in a simple pie chart, offering potential insights for continuous improvement. For example, if several people spend 40% of their time modelling structural rebars, maybe we should develop an automated tool to improve efficiency. If no one used our in-house Revit plug-in, perhaps we need to remind staff of the tool’s existence to further adoption. If 25% of the time is spent on clash detection, we may have a bigger project management issue that needs investigation. It made perfect sense.
But then it dawned on me – that pie chart will always show 100%. Like a professional Whac-A-Mole, if we eliminate one task, another will simply pop up somewhere else. Clearly, some tasks are more desirable than others. But how do we decide which tasks should be maximised and which should be minimised? Put simply, how do we identify what matters, and how do we measure it?
The cult of busy
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Albert Einstein
It is not uncommon to be asked, “How’s work going?” only to hear the reply, “Great, I’m really busy”. In fact, being busy has become synonymous with getting things done. Collectively, we’ve determined that being busy is a leading indicator of high performance.1 If our calendars are full, we must be important.
But things didn’t always use to be this way. Historically, status has been measured by how much leisure time you have.3 Access to leisure implied wealth, as those with more resources could afford to work less. However, recent research shows a shift in how society gauges status, from the preciousness and scarcity of goods to the preciousness and scarcity of individuals.4 In other words, busyness has replaced wealth as the leading status symbol.
Busyness is not effectiveness
The problem with this way of thinking is that being busy is not the same as being productive. It is possible to be busy, very busy, without being effective. As Peter Bregman explains, “It’s the difference between running on a treadmill and running to a destination. They’re both running, but being busy is running in place.”6 This should come as no surprise. How often have you been ‘busy’ in meetings, only to walk out and exclaim what a waste of time that was?
Another drawback of busyness as the dominant metric is that people can make themselves remarkably busy without ever actually being stretched beyond their comfort level.7 This is especially problematic for knowledge workers because, as Tony Fadell, the father of the iPod, explains, “Humans learn through productive struggle, by trying it themselves and screwing up and doing it differently next time.”8 Busyness is therefore neither effective nor productive.
The problem with time
It is not hard to see why knowledge workers focus on time as the leading metric of productivity. Author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey explains, “while productivity is relatively easy to measure on a factory floor, or on the farm, we have yet to develop good metrics for measuring the productivity of knowledge workers. So we largely rely on hours worked and face time in the office as markers of effort…”.10 But when we measure time, we do so at the expense of measuring productivity.
Consider the following thought experiment where a task needs to be completed:
- Person A works through the night to finish the task.
- Person B finishes the task in half a day and goes home early.
- Person C recognises that the task is systemic and spends three days developing a tool that automates the task.
How would an AEC organisation evaluate the performance of the three individuals? With time as the key metric, as it most commonly is, organisations will typically reward Person A due to their hard work and commitment, burning the midnight oil for the glory of the organisation. Person B would be cast aside as not a team player, even though they were simply more efficient at completing the task. Person C would likely be considered wasteful for taking too long to complete the task, as the return on their investment cannot be materialised until someone else needs to do the same task, a byproduct of the AEC industry’s project-centric decision-making nature.
Get off the busy bandwagon
Using a different metric, however, we would arrive at a very different conclusion. If efficiency is of primary concern, it is clear that Person B is the most effective as they completed the task the quickest. Alternatively, if productivity were the key metric, Person C would be the most productive, as they undertook a high-leverage activity. In other words, they didn’t just do their own job; they also improved the output of others.
Ditching the urgency addiction
The most urgent decisions are rarely the most important ones.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Not only does the AEC industry wrongly focus on time as a key metric, but it is also overly reactive to urgent matters, fighting fires and dealing with project deadlines. However, the reality is that the urgency of these matters is usually based on the priorities and expectations of others. This reactiveness creates all sorts of issues ranging from technical debt to wage theft. But most importantly, it means we are constantly working in the business, rather than on the business. It is clear that before the AEC industry can even think about measuring what matters, we must ditch our urgency addiction and make time for things that matter. It isn’t about saving time. It’s about making time for what matters.
Time management matrix
Every activity can be categorised as either urgent or not urgent, as well as important or non-important. Urgent means that it requires immediate attention. Important, on the other hand, has to do with results. Using these categories, we can plot activities into their various quadrants.
Urgent and non-important
Urgent and non-important tasks include most phone calls, emails and meetings, and should be minimised where possible. A straightforward way to achieve this is to use a visual work management system such as a Kanban board. Kanban software like Trello enables far greater transparency and effective project planning than meeting minutes and long email threads. Moreover, the ability to hyperlink to documents, add comments explaining why changes have occurred, and view when a task was completed and by whom, provides a comprehensive audit trail located in a central location.
Non-urgent and non-important
Non-urgent and non-important tasks are often considered busywork, which has little to no value and should be eliminated whenever possible. Busywork includes completing tasks that could be automated. The AEC industry is especially prone to this, think employees with headphones on, spending hours renaming items in Revit or on the server when it could have been easily automated, if not by them, by someone else. However, the question is never raised out of fear of being seen as incompetent. Such situations typically stem from low psychological safety within the organisation and are of great concern.
Urgent and important
Urgent and important tasks include deadline-driven projects, and this is where the AEC industry spends most of its time. We react to the chest-thumping project manager demanding that intermediate milestones be met. So corners are cut to just get it out the door. And just like that, technical debt accumulates like suspense in an Alfred Hitchcock film until a tipping point, when issues are beyond repair. Responding to such situations is just fighting fires, resolving only the symptom, not the underlying cause.
Important and non-urgent
Important and non-urgent activities, on the other hand, enable you to be proactive and address issues before they become problematic. Important and non-urgent activities include strategic planning, training, research and development, and vacations. But because they are non-urgent, we must make time for them, or we’ll get sucked into the cult of busy. As Stephen Covey so eloquently said, “The key is not to prioritise what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”12
Towards the right metrics
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle
Structured goal setting should be at the core of any business, but metrics in isolation can be misleading. Consider the following sports analogy. I could go for a run with a smartwatch, and after I’m presented with numerous metrics. Let’s consider just three metrics for this exercise: length, time and average pace. Barring any technical issues, such as GPS dropouts, the metrics are about as accurate as possible outside of a lab setting. But do they show the complete picture?
Say the length of the run was 5 km and the time was 25 minutes. However, this run could have been completed at a steady 5-minute-per-kilometre pace, or it could have been a series of sub-4-minute miles with walk recoveries, also with an average pace of 5 minutes per kilometre—very different workouts, exercising different physiological systems. One would place me as a weekend warrior, the other at a national or international level. But how do we know which? We can’t because the metrics in isolation don’t convey the whole picture.
To gain a comprehensive understanding, we require additional metrics. We might want to consider splits, heart rate, elevation gain or perceived effort. But even then, we still need the data to be interpreted. This ambiguity is one of the reasons athletes have coaches, as they can contextualise results.
The equivalent of a sports coach for knowledge workers is organisational leadership. In the words of Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.13 Central to this is that what we choose to measure matters. Because if you measure something, you’re telling people that it matters.“14
What we choose to measure matters
Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A former colleague, who was a design technology leader, was routinely harassed into completing his timesheets—a common scenario in AEC organisations. What was unexpected, however, was his response. He completed the entire year’s timesheet in advance. Every week was exactly the same – 40 hours. The response was swift and critical: You can’t do that! Why? Because it’s not accurate. How are we meant to know how many hours you worked?
But here’s the thing. The person in question was categorised as ‘overhead’ and never assigned to projects. Additionally, the organisation didn’t pay overtime. So even if he worked longer, he wouldn’t get paid for it. Putting aside any statutory reporting compliance, there was no value in completing the timesheet. However, because it was being measured, it communicated that it mattered. A useless metric with little value. And this is just one example.
Aligning reward systems with values
Consider the difference between management and leadership personnel. Leadership always want their organisation to improve, either through greater efficiency, innovation or a combination of the two. Critically, however, they expect the entire organisation, including management, to align with these strategic directions. However, management is tasked with delivering projects, and they know the metric by which they will be rewarded is the success of their project. Why then should they care about other projects or the organisation?
In other words, management is incentivised to adopt a project-first mentality, entirely at odds with leadership’s organisation-first desire. The reward system is entirely out of alignment with stated values. The net result is that the organisation finds it difficult to change; lots of initiatives, but very little to see for their efforts.
Do what matters
The misalignment of values and reward systems is a recurring problem. If we value employees being team players, why do we compensate individuals rather than tying rewards to the team’s overall success? If we value innovation, why do we reward staff who spend the longest in the office rather than those who are most productive? If we value the organisation over the project, why do we reward those who focus on urgent and important tasks over those who focus on important and non-urgent tasks? If we want to achieve the desired change, we must set up systems that reward what organisations value.
Annual performance reviews
To further compound the issue, many organisations don’t convey what is important and expect it to disseminate through osmosis. The closest many employees come to understanding the organisation’s values is through antiquated annual performance reviews. This review is often a mechanical process that creates no discernible value beyond satisfying the human resources department. Indeed, Gallup data from 2020 revealed that 86% of employees don’t think their annual review is accurate.15
It is akin to going to a bad dentist: Before you go, you dread it; while you’re there, it’s painful; after it’s done, nothing’s fixed. The reviewer doesn’t want to be there because they already have too much on their plate. The reviewee doesn’t want to be there because they have project deadlines, and the ‘feedback’ they receive is often generic.
Timely feedback
However, the biggest problem with annual reviews is that they are not timely. Imagine a sports team where the coach only gave feedback once at the end of the season. There is no way the team would improve. By the time they receive the feedback, it’s too late to fix it. It would be considered absurd, but for some reason, we find it completely acceptable in a knowledge-based profession.
As Andy Grove rightly notes, “For the feedback to be effective, it must be received very soon after the activity it is measuring occurs.”16 What this translates to is ditching the annual review and replacing it with frequent feedback sessions. The benefit of this approach is that it more closely follows the natural cycle of work. Ideally, conversations between managers and employees occur when projects finish, milestones are reached, challenges pop up, and so forth, so employees can learn and continuously improve in real time.17
Conclusion
It is true that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. But what this saying fails to acknowledge is that what we choose to measure matters. And it matters a lot.
The current system of measuring time to evaluate knowledge workers is highly problematic. Firstly, it fosters the cult of busy, confusing busyness with effectiveness; It is possible to be busy, very busy, without being effective. Secondly, it fails to account for the fact that metrics in isolation can be misleading; Data must be contextualised before it can be meaningful. Finally, it steers organisations to react to important and urgent matters; But this resolves only the symptom, not the underlying cause.
It is clear that before the AEC industry can even think about measuring what matters, we must ditch our urgency addiction and make time for things that matter. It isn’t about saving time. It’s about making time for what matters. So block out time and start putting first things first. Remember, the key is not to prioritise what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.
References
1 Amaechi, J. (2021). The promise of giants. Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London, p.69.
2 Knapp, J. & Zeratsky, J. (2018). Make time: How to focus on what matters every day. Transworld, London, p.1.
3 Covey, S. (2020). Seven habits of highly effective people. Simon & Schuster, London, p. 206.
4 Bellezza, S. et al (Jun 2017). Conspicuous consumption of time: When busyness and lack of leisure time become a status symbol. Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 118 – 138.
5 Knapp, J. & Zeratsky, J. (2018). Make time: How to focus on what matters every day. Transworld, London, p.1.
6 Bregman, P. (28 Mar 2016). You need to practice being your future self. In Harvard Business Review.
7 Amaechi, J. (2021). The promise of giants. Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London, p.114.
8 Fadell, T. (2022). Build: An unorthodox guide to making things worth making. Penguin Random House, London, p.8.
9 Knapp, J. (2016). Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days. Bantam Press, London, p.38.
10 Covey, S. (2020). Seven habits of highly effective people. Simon & Schuster, London, pp.206-207.
11 Based on Covey, S. (2020). Seven habits of highly effective people. Simon & Schuster, London, p.173.
12 Covey, S. (2020). Seven habits of highly effective people. Simon & Schuster, London, p.183.
13 Covey, S. (2020). Seven habits of highly effective people. Simon & Schuster, London, p.115.
14 Seidman, D. (2007). How: Why how we do anything means everything…in business (and in life). Wiley, London.
15 Buckingham, M. (30 April 2022). Annual reviews are a terrible way to evaluate employees. In Wall Street Journal.
16 Doerr, J. (2018). Measure what matters. OKRs – the simple idea that drives 10x growth. Penguin Random House, London, p.51.
17 Cappelli, P. & Tavis, A. (Oct 2016). The performance management revolution. In Harvard Business Review.
2 Comments
Fabio L Oliveira
Good article as always, mate. Thank you.
Paul Wintour
Your welcome Mr Fabio. Glad you found it valuable.