Originally posted at http://www.howtomeasureanything.com, on Friday, March 20, 2009 9:14:48 PM, by jerry.

“Greetings,

I loved your book. Thanks for sharing such valuable information. Now I’m trying to apply it.

I am leading a project of training developers and instructional designers and am attempting to put together a meaningful way to measure their performance. I have come up with some parameters that seem evident to me, such as time to complete a lesson, number of edits recommended (to the designer), type of edits recommended (order, strategies, completeness of content), edit recommendation trends (is the number of recommended edits going up or going down).

Is there a particular part of your book I should re-read that would help me frame a thorough performance evaluation measuring framework? Or can you suggest anything that would help expand the framework or make it a more reliable measure of performance?

Thank you in advance for any direction you can point me in or for any suggestions you can provide.

Jerry”

Thanks for reading my book. I think you might find part of what you are looking for in Chapter 11 on measuring preferences and attitudes. On page 197 I show how different performance measures of a software developer could be combined into a single metric by quantifying the acceptable tradeoffs.

You might also consider more of an “end result” metric of some kind. Isn’t the ultimate success of the instructional material measured by the performance of students? Obviously, many things affect the performance of students but among those should be the design of the material. Individual students will vary but if one set of material consistently results in better student performance than another set, then I think it’s fair to attribute some of that to the material designer.

Thanks,

Doug Hubbard