Time's Up!

20Knowledge Worker KPIs and the After‐Action Review (AAR)

What made the traditional workforce productive was the system—whether it was Frederick Winslow Taylor's “one best way,” Henry Ford's assembly line, or Ed Deming's Total Quality Management. The system embodies the knowledge. The system is productive because it enables individual workers to perform without much knowledge or skill… . In a knowledge‐based organization, however, it is the individual worker's productivity that makes the system productive. In a traditional workforce, the worker serves the system; in a knowledge workforce the system must serve the worker.

—Peter Drucker, Managing in the Next Society, 2002

Engage in this thought experiment: You want to build the world's finest automobile. You decide to use individual parts with a reputation for excellence from various cars around the world—the engine from a Ferrari, the brakes from a Porsche, the suspension from a BMW, and so on. What you would end up with is not the world's greatest automobile, but rather, a really expensive pile of junk.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem with the way we attempt to measure the “efficiency” of knowledge workers—we measure each task in six‐minute increments in the false belief that maximizing the efficiency of each one will maximize the efficiency of the entire firm. Yet knowledge work is not repetitive, it is iterative and reiterative. That is, it is a process of the mind, a difficult place for metrics to have any meaning. ...