Measuring Organizational Friction with Bugs

In How Organizational Friction Kills Scalability, I talked about the importance of measuring friction to prepare the Organization to Scale.

One of the metrics mentioned was using Bugs to identify anything that doesn’t work as expected. Basically, you want to record a Bug every time you feel friction in your day-to-day work.

Just counting the number of Bugs is not enough; you also need a way to prioritize. Thus, recording a Bug should come with a pain level.

To make it simple, at Nanoramic we created a scale for pain levels and we are assigning pain points to a Bug using this scale.

Although we are not a software company, we use an agile development tool (JIRA) to record Bugs.

We use Slack to communicate internally, so if somebody records a bug in JIRA, it is automatically posted to a public channel so everybody can be made aware of the Bug.

This will allow other people to recognize the Bug as a pain for them too and express this fact by voting on the Bug.

In the end the Total Pain Points accumulated by the Bug are calculated as follows:

Bug Pain Points = Pain Level * (1+ Votes)

Using a tracking tool for Bugs allows us to prioritize and track their treatment. We are also able to create Dashboards, giving us a good idea of the pain level across the company and its evolution in the last 30 days.

For each day, we count the balance of open Bugs and the sum of Pain Points accumulated by the Bugs. This dashboard is projected in real time on TVs across the company.

Eric Kish is the author of Everyday Turnaround — The Science of Daily Business Transformation.