Every manager seems to know the acronym SMART, although they are often not clear about what it means. Wikipedia has quite a few variations and that illustrates how fuzzy people are about the meaning. Most managers I know think SMART means "simple, measurable, ... and some other stuff". They rarely get past item two in the acronym.
The SMART acronym is applied especially to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). I hate KPIs because they distract from the work we are supposed to be doing. KPIs are simply lazy management.
Some examples:
I was told at one company that a particular person, let's call him Uriah, was an expert on defining KPIs. Uriah had a "senior" position as the assistant to the IT Director. So Uriah came along to my desk to help me with my KPIs. My reluctance to waste my time on meaningless KPIs was mistaken for a lack of ability. Uriah asked me what I did last month. I told him the main tasks I had performed and those included a data profiling exercise. After I explained what that meant he asked me how many files I had profiled. I said that was irrelevant because they were of widely varying sizes (from 5 fields per record to 150 fields per record) but he said, "that doesn't matter. How many files?". I checked and told him 37, in the hope that he would leave me alone. So he said, "OK, so we'll make your KPI for next month 40 files". I said that I didn't need to do any data profiling next month and he said, "that doesn't matter. Just load 40 files into the profiling tool, and put 40 files on your KPI report."
That's how you get to be a KPI expert.
When working on railway safety systems I worked with some very fine people who courageously checked the quality of the work done by contractors replacing sections of track. Lives depend on this work and the Quality Assurance people were out there every day making sure the railways were safe, except for two days a month when they were in the office "doing their KPIs". They wasted two days every month doing the stupid things their managers were measuring them on so that they could get out there in the real world the rest of the time to protect the lives of the railway staff and the public who used the train service. Their work was very necessary because the contractors had "efficiency targets" (more KPIs) that encouraged them to cut corners.
An even more important mis-use of KPIs was reported by an ex-police chief on national radio in the UK. He explained that police officers had KPIs based on conviction rates. Rape cases have low conviction rates because it is so often difficult to establish what actually happened and therefore difficult to get a conviction. Since police officers were measured on this dumb KPI they avoided rape cases to make their KPI figures better. No doubt, some conscientious police officers prioritised their cases with professionalism and sensitivity to the seriousness of the crime and they got bad KPI numbers, so they were not the ones who got promoted. Eventually, those who were prepared to maximise their KPI numbers were the only ones left.
In the TV series "The Wire" the fine cop Cedric was finally made Chief of Police. He refused to "juke the stats, because that's how we got into this mess in the first place" and that was the end of his short career as police chief. "The Wire" was popular because it was just like the real world.
People always say that staff will understand that they have a broad job to do and the KPIs are just a management tool, but when you put in KPIs and measure them, then you filter out the people who care and you are left with those who are prepared to play the game. This is a terrible outcome. It punishes the good people and rewards the jobsworths.
I say that KPIs are lazy management because good managers know what their staff are doing and work with them to make sure that they understand what the organisation is trying to achieve. Lazy managers just find some simple measures that are easy to collect so that they can take it easy and just report (or get some minion to report) some numbers at the end of each month. KPIs are surrogates for the things we really want to optimise and they are almost never completely aligned with those real objectives. Because the KPIs are simple and measurable they are easy to fake. Those who don't care about their work think only about how to get the best numbers. These people succeed and the good ones are held back, or leave the organisation. KPIs demoralise good people and build organisations that care only about covering their backsides.
Whenever there is some scandal with a large organisation there is a manager who says that he had no idea that things were going wrong. This is often true. It is true because he made it clear to his staff that he didn't want to know the truth; he just wanted them to make things look good so that he would get his bonus, or promotion, or both.
Eventually, some of these managers-by-KPIs become CEOs. Then life becomes very easy. They have just one KPI and that is the amount of money that is paid to them every year. At the highest levels this is carefully engineered to bear no relationship to their performance. But the CEO makes every decision based on whether it will increase or decrease his personal wealth. The company becomes the host to this parasite, who takes ever-increasing amounts of money until the company fails. When the company does fail, there is usually a short period just before the failure becomes visible to the public, when the CEO makes sure that he will get a huge bonus before the shit hits the fan.
This is not good for business and it is especially not good for the customers, the employees or the shareholders. We need to end this dumb-KPI culture and start trying to understand real performance.