When you hire a consultant, you eventually want to see measurable results from the investment. But letting the consultant define the metrics for improvement is "a sucker bet," warns consultant Bob Lewis. Instead, you must decide what improvement you want measured, he advises.

Sharing some pointers from the inside, Lewis warns in a post at InfoWorld that consultants have all kinds of tricks up their sleeves to make their results measure up, beginning with switching metrics in mid-stream. If an original metric doesn't improve, consultants have been known to confess to having chosen it wrong in the first place.

Another favorite trick is choosing a metric they know they can improve, such as process cycle time, at the expense of another important metric, such as throughput. A third trick is to select a metric that will show "improvement" even though it isn't necessarily beneficial to the business.

Lewis's "First Law of Metrics" is "You get what you measure." If, for example, you measure management quality by employee turnover, employee performance evaluations will start looking really good and managers will be trying to reward everyone with raises. "In other words, some of the behavior that a given business metric drives is aimed at gaming the metric whenever that's easier than actually improving the business," he points out. "It's especially true when a company ties anyone's compensation to measurable improvement."

For more:
- see Bob Lewis's post at InfoWorld

Related Articles:
How to use metrics to talk to the business
Moneyball's metrics lessons for IT
The best metrics to prove IT's value