Web Performance Matters

Peter Drucker is often called "the father of modern management". Many books and Web sites are devoted to his insights, some of which I have written about previously.

This post highlights his incisive observation about the difference between effectiveness and efficiency. I have always found it to be especially memorable, and quoted it (twice) when discussing priorities and choices in my book about software performance. Unfortunately I got the source wrong, but thanks to Google I can now correct my mistake.

It appeared in Managing for Business Effectiveness, an article in the May/June 1963 edition of Harvard Business Review ("HBR"). You can also find it in a February 2006 HBR article -- What Executives Should Remember -- a collection of excerpts drawn from HBR articles by Drucker published between 1963 and 2004.

Click to read more ...

Posts on The Importance of Measurements and Controlling Software Projects have reviewed the origin of the saying that "you can't manage what you can't (or don't) measure". Today I look more closely at its meaning and validity -- how true is it?

One apparent contradiction is that this much quoted fact of management is also widely viewed as a fallacy -- or at least, as an over-exaggerated claim -- especially by people in the software engineering profession, which seems (in the person of Tom DeMarco) to have coined the saying in the first place. That contradiction was highlighted in a 2003 book by Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering [Amazon].

Click to read more ...

My post on The importance of measurements highlighted Lord Kelvin's famous statement that "if you cannot measure, then your knowledge is meagre and unsatisfactory", and the modern saying that "you can't manage what you can't (or don't) measure." Both advance the notion that measurements are indispensable.

I also discussed the origin of the second saying, which is very widely quoted, but rarely attributed to anyone. People sometimes cite Peter Drucker or W. Edwards Deming, but it seems fairly certain that both of those attributions are mistaken.

Click to read more ...

Since I am writing a series of posts about managing Rich Internet Applications, and working on a post about the difficulties of measuring them, I thought I should begin with the popular management aphorism that you can't manage what you can't measure. Well, was that ever a diversion! Everyone is familiar with this saying, but interestingly, despite a ton of digging on the Web, the precise origin of this saying remains obscure (at least, to me).

Click to read more ...