555 Days of 10,000 steps or more.

What gets measured gets managed.

What gets measured gets managed, is something I learned early in my career, does it still hold true today?

My 555 days is some evidence that counting my steps has helped to keep me active and healthy. Measuring progress can be motivational if there’s a clear goal, therefore project and programme managers should measure success and then we’ll manage success!

Here’s a couple of worldwide metrics that illustrate that things aren’t quite as simple.

GDP gets measured and there’s also a league table showing that the USA is top of that list closely followed by China. They seem to be competing with each other, is the measurement of GDP something that motivates the governments to increase their deficit to extreme levels to stay top of the list?

Finding out exactly what actually contributes towards GDP is complex, does government subsidies and deficit contribute? It appears to. (I don’t know the difference between deficits and debt, they seem to have the same results) Many countries in the top twenty GDP are heavily indebted, maybe this should affect their results.

Then there’s ‘GDP per capita’ which seems to be more applicable to us as individuals, and surprisingly Monaco is top of that. However very little emphasis is placed on this measure. Is that because it’s not a focus of the big important nations? They don’t manage this statistic as extensively because they are not top of the list?

What about Homelessness, is that measured and managed appropriately?

If I was measuring homelessness I’d count the number of people who are sleeping on the streets or have been put in hotels and hostels etc.

The UK government has some rather strange measures, here’s one such example:

“Number of households initially assessed as owed prevention or relief duties, and households in temporary accommodation on the last day of the quarter since 2019 Q2.”

What is wrong with measuring the number of people sleeping rough? That would be how most of us would define a homeless person, appreciating that some people are sofa surfing with friends who could be considered homeless.

This is the official government definition:

“Rough sleeping snapshot statistics, about people sleeping rough on a single night in autumn each year. These statistics provide a way of estimating the number of people sleeping rough across England on a single night and assessing change over time.”

Do they only go and count people once a year?

Depending on which measure the UK government claim it has increased by 10.4% or 3.1% or even 4.6%

I’ve been travelling around Great Britain for about fifty years and initially it was rare to see a homeless person, we called them Tramps back in my youth. Over the years I noticed a steady increase in homeless men. Very rarely did I see homeless women and I put that down to relationships breaking up and the fathers leaving their homes for their wives and children.

After the lockdown hysteria, which was almost five years ago, doesn’t time fly. I returned to London and the number of homeless people had grown steadily.

Last year there was at least a 50% increase in my simple measure, which is an estimate of how many I actually saw.

Last week I had the misfortune to be staying in London near Goodge Street and walking along Tottenham Court Road I was deeply disturbed by the exponential growth in homelessness.

No other word than exponential describes what I saw, even elderly women were amongst them. Every single shop doorway and anywhere that had a cover was used, and there were even some tents that had obviously been there a few months. Interestingly the tents were UN coloured.

The nearby university had no signs of homelessness, neither did the government buildings which could afford twenty four hour security, only the small businesses were subject to the homeless encampments.

I have no desire to ever visit London again.

Step counts are measures that are managed.

Project timescale, costs, quality, scope, risk and benefits are measures that get managed.

The two examples above, GDP and homelessness are not clearly measured and as a result they are probably manipulated.

After being taught that what gets measured gets managed, I learned that what gets measured also gets manipulated.

I’ve not written anything on my Substack for a long time, for a couple of reasons. I’ve been incredibly busy helping my daughters out and, as a result I’ve suffered with some pretty bad sciatica, so I’m struggling to sit down for long periods, still can’t sadly but it’s improving slowly.

Thanks for reading.