Measure everything, manage to the milestones

Count widely; steer by few — and be forthright about what the arithmetic shows.

The two halves correct each other. Measure everything: durations, float consumed, constraints cleared, commitments made and kept, what was offered and asked, what was learned. Manage to the milestones: hold the body to the small number of markers it is actually steering by, and let the rest be instruments rather than targets. A body that manages to everything it measures will chase numbers; a body that measures only what it manages will be surprised.

It is load-bearing because it is the rule that keeps measurement honest. Numbers here exist to make reality visible early — a missed marker has done its job when it shows lateness while there is time to act. So the discipline is to say what the math shows, in the words the math supports, rather than to dress a hope as a forecast or hide a slip in an average. Kept as a share of made is the first number any group should know about itself, and it is a reading, not a grade.

The standing caution is the single-metric rule: the wise right path is never a number maximised. Measures serve Value — throughput of the Goal — and any measure that begins to be optimised against the Goal is discarded, loudly, rather than defended. Which is why the milestones, and not the metrics, are what a body manages to.

Also called: the management rule of the OS Stands on: Milestone · Honesty about time · The Record Opens onto: Kept as a share of made · The Score · Float · Value · Navigation In play: table · Home · beyond Sources: The LIØNSBERG Operating System (book, draft v0) §5 · Float and Milestone (wiki term pages, drafts, unreviewed) · The DNA of Heaven, Part VII — lionsberg.wiki page name: Milestones Open: none found.