One of my favorite teachers in college was a former managerial consultant and our class enjoyed being regaled with stories of her former clients - a veritable who’s who of major companies - and the challenges they faced. I recall one lecture when she was telling us about reports and communications and how you need to understand the psychological impact they may have on an organization. She was working with a major department store in the early 90’s when the organization was in a steep decline.

An eager consultant, she went to the stores to talk to the line managers and other employees to get a better understanding of marketplace and the company’s clients. As she began interviewing people and asking what their responsibilities were, she kept hearing one thing: reduce shrinkage, the industry term for theft. Amazingly the vast majority of retail employees seemed to believe that their number one responsibility was to ensure that potential customers in the store were not stealing; how did this happen? Apparently, each store received only one report a month, one that measured inventory losses. Now the retailer had many other metrics, but this was the only one communicated to the entire organization. There was no strategic reason why this single report was distributed, someone began sending it out years ago and no continued to happen simply because people were used to it. Yet, this seemingly innocent little communication had changed the behavior of so many of the company’s employees. Instead of seeing potential customers as people looking for help, they were perceived as potential shoplifters!

This concept is an important one to appreciate. What we measure and how we communicate has a major impact in how we frame a situation and ultimately how we act. The law of unintended consequences invariably rears its ugly head if we try to focus too much on a limited set of measures. For those of you who are wondering where I’m going with this post, as the title would imply, I think this can sometimes be the case with story points. Now story points and their complimentary project burn-down charts are not a bad thing. Quite the contrary, they are a very valuable tool. However, they are simply meant to be a measure of the relative amount of work, the rate its getting done and a projection of how long it will take to complete. Story points are not a means unto themselves and we need to be careful to understand the role of points and not let them distract us from the more important goal of business value.

No I’m not saying that all people make this mistake, but rather that we need to understand its an inherent risk whenever we measure something that we will optimize on that to the detriment of that which we don’t measure. To go back to the analogy of an addiction, points are a valuable resource, but we can go to far and use them to compensate for other problems, thereby creating an over dependence. This will also allow other issues, like an inability to measure value, to fester. Ultimately, we are worse off for this type of addictive behavior.

So, if you are operating in an organization that does not have a clear way to measure business value, but can measure points, this becomes a distinct risk. When setting up a project, we should ask ourselves how we’re going to measure progress and what will truly deliver value. Establishing metrics around these vectors will pay high dividends later on and let us focus on the true priority at hand.