Metrics are a hot topic. Executive leadership, boards of directors, management, and customers are all asking for data-based decisions. As a result, many managers, professionals, and change agents are asked to develop metrics, but have no clear idea of how to produce meaningful ones. Wouldn’t it be great to have a simple explanation of how to collect, analyze, report, and use measurements to improve your organization? Metrics: How to Improve Key Business Results provides that explanation and the tools you'll need to make your organization more effective. Not only does the book explain the “why” of metrics, but it walks you through a step-by-step process for creating a report card that provides a clear picture of organizational health and how well you satisfy customer needs. Metrics will help you to measure the right things, the right way—the first time. No wasted effort, no chasing data. The report card provides a simple tool for viewing the health of your organization, from the outside in. You will learn how to measure the key components of the report card and thereby improve real measures of business success, like repeat customers, customer loyalty, and word-of-mouth advertising. This book: Provides a step-by-step guide for building an organizational effectiveness report card Takes you from identifying key services and products and using metrics, to determining business strategy Provides examples of how to identify, collect, analyze, and report metrics that will be immediately useful for improving all aspects of the enterprise, including IT

Mike Woodcock and Dave Francis are two of the most influential writers and designers of materials for team development of the last 30 years. This collection of Team Metrics brings together some of their very best material for measuring aspects of team performance. The collection includes a variety of audits, questionnaires and surveys, which can be used in a training environment or as real-time team interventions. The 27 items in the collection cover team and team leader skills, team development, team motivation, team roles, team culture, climate and communication, making this a must-have collection of team development materials for trainers, facilitators and team leaders. A CD is supplied with every manual which provides a Powerpoint slide presentation for each of the 27 metrics.

A Framework for Managing, Measuring, and Predicting Attributes of Software Development Products and ProcessesReflecting the immense progress in the development and use of software metrics in the past decades, Software Metrics: A Rigorous and Practical Approach, Third Edition provides an up-to-date, accessible, and comprehensive introduction to soft

This Seventh Edition of Donald Reifer's popular, bestselling tutorial summarizes what software project managers need to know to be successful on the job. The text provides pointers and approaches to deal with the issues, challenges, and experiences that shape their thoughts and performance. To accomplish its goals, the volume explores recent advances in dissimilar fields such as management theory, acquisition management, globalization, knowledge management, licensing, motivation theory, process improvement, organization dynamics, subcontract management, and technology transfer. Software Management provides software managers at all levels of the organization with the information they need to know to develop their software engineering management strategies for now and the future. The book provides insight into management tools and techniques that work in practice. It also provides sufficient instructional materials to serve as a text for a course in software management. This new edition achieves a balance between theory and practical experience. Reifer systematically addresses the skills, knowledge, and abilities that software managers, at any level of experience, need to have to practice their profession effectively. This book contains original articles by leaders in the software management field written specifically for this tutorial, as well as a collection of applicable reprints. About forty percent of the material in this edition has been produced specifically for the tutorial. Contents: * Introduction * Life Cycle Models * Process Improvement * Project Management * Planning Fundamentals * Software Estimating * Organizing for Success * Staffing Essentials * Direction Advice * Visibility and Control * Software Risk Management * Metrics and Measurement * Acquisition Management * Emerging Management Topics "The challenges faced by software project managers are the gap between what the customers can envision and the reality on the ground and how to deal with the risks associated with this gap in delivering a product that meets requirements on time and schedule at the target costs. This tutorial hits the mark by providing project managers, practitioners, and educators with source materials on how project managers can effectively deal with this risk." -Dr. Kenneth E. Nidiffer, Systems & Software Consortium, Inc. "The volume has evolved into a solid set of foundation works for anyone trying to practice software management in a world that is increasingly dependent on software release quality, timeliness, and productivity." -Walker Royce, Vice President, IBM Software Services-Rational

'What gets measured gets fixed' and this is as true of the pharmaceutical industry as any other. The problem is that pharmaceutical businesses are complex. Drug research and development involves extended and expensive processes; defining appropriate metrics for these processes is not easy, yet ineffective or misguided metrics can be more damaging than none at all. David Zuckerman's Pharmaceutical Metrics is an extremely practical guide to selecting a system, selling it to top management, choosing and defining the right metrics for your system, communicating and displaying the results. And because metrics are about how to shape and develop your business, he explores how to deploy them organization-wide and make sure that they are driving business improvement. In order to reflect the needs of different types of pharmaceutical company the author uses four sample companies, throughout the book, to illustrate the principles for 'big pharma', 'micro pharma', a virtual development company and a CRO. This highly practical book provides a step-by-step guide to creating a state-of-the-art, strategy-driven metrics system for pharmaceutical R&D, supported by case studies of the techniques applied and tips for optimizing the system.

How the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced new forms of academic fraud and misconduct. The traditional academic imperative to “publish or perish” is increasingly coupled with the newer necessity of “impact or perish”—the requirement that a publication have “impact,” as measured by a variety of metrics, including citations, views, and downloads. Gaming the Metrics examines how the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced radically new forms of academic fraud and misconduct. The contributors show that the metrics-based “audit culture” has changed the ecology of research, fostering the gaming and manipulation of quantitative indicators, which lead to the invention of such novel forms of misconduct as citation rings and variously rigged peer reviews. The chapters, written by both scholars and those in the trenches of academic publication, provide a map of academic fraud and misconduct today. They consider such topics as the shortcomings of metrics, the gaming of impact factors, the emergence of so-called predatory journals, the “salami slicing” of scientific findings, the rigging of global university rankings, and the creation of new watchdogs and forensic practices.