You hear names thrown around sometimes, you know? Like someone comes up with a neat way to explain things, and suddenly it’s the big thing everyone’s supposed to do. Made me think about this one time, way back.
That Big Push for ‘Results’
There was this period at an old place I worked, maybe five, six years ago. Management got this idea, probably from some conference, that we needed to measure everything. Not just if we finished a project, but the real impact. Sounds good, right? Like common sense.
So, the whole thing kicked off. We had meetings. Lots of them. PowerPoints with fancy charts showing levels and stages. I remember sitting there, thinking, “Okay, how do we actually do this?” Nobody seemed quite sure, but everyone nodded along.
My job got tangled up in it. I was supposed to help figure out how our little team’s work connected to the grand scheme. So, I started trying to track things.
- First, I tried making these detailed logs. What we did, who it was for, what they said afterward.
- Then, I went around trying to talk to people in other departments. Asked them, “Hey, did that thing we built actually help you? How?”
- Made some simple surveys too. Sent them out. Got maybe half back, mostly filled with vague stuff.
It felt like wading through mud. People were busy. They didn’t have time to fill out forms about how some internal tool ‘changed their behavior’ or whatever the fancy term was. They just wanted to get their work done. And honestly? I couldn’t blame them.
We spent weeks, maybe months, trying to fit our messy reality into these neat little boxes they wanted. It was frustrating. You’d have this great project, everyone felt good about it, but you couldn’t find the ‘right’ number to prove its ‘Level 3 impact’ or whatever nonsense they called it.
I remember one specific project. We built this internal knowledge base thing. Took ages. People genuinely used it, you could see the difference in how quickly new folks got up to speed. But trying to quantify that? Put a dollar sign on it for the big bosses? Nightmare.
Where It All Ended Up
In the end, like a lot of these big initiatives, it just sort of… fizzled out. We collected a bunch of data, filled some spreadsheets, presented some confusing charts. Management nodded, said “Good work,” and then a few months later, everyone was onto the next big idea. The spreadsheets gathered digital dust.
It taught me something, though. Sometimes the straightforward, common-sense stuff gets lost when you try too hard to package it neatly. You just know when something works, you feel it, you see it in the daily grind. Trying to force it into a formula doesn’t always make it clearer. Sometimes, it just makes things complicated.
