Partial Baskets Are Still Worth 0 Points
In the 2010-2011 NCAA basketball season, Butler University built atop an improbably successful basketball season the previous year by repeating their run to the NCAA title game. There was a lot of hype leading into the game. Could mid-sized Butler really topple a mighty basketball powerhouse like UConn and win a national championship?
Butler came into the game full of quiet confidence, but for whatever reason they were never able to find a shooting rhythm like they'd had in previous games. In the biggest game of the year they managed to make only a pitiful 18.75% of their shots from the field. They fought hard, executed their offense and played excellent defense, but were not able to overcome such woeful shooting numbers. UConn won the title, and Butler got to head home, in the words of Jerry Seinfeld, as "the best loser."
It's not my intent to pick on Butler — I often cheer for the underdog so I was hoping they would win. My heart broke for them as they continued to try in vain. The point is to drive home the title of this post: Partial baskets are still worth 0 points. Butler had so many partial baskets, shots that nearly went in, that they may have won the game if those counted for something. Unfortunately, a partial basket is worth the same as a turnover: Nothing.
It's funny how obvious this is in sports, but when it comes to business we pretend like it doesn't apply.
Let's suppose you are working on a software product, and you have exactly one primary competitor. You both ship your next release at the same time. Your competitor's product has 10 key features that customers want. Your product has 8 of those same features. You also know you were working on the other two features, plus five others, but those seven features did not get into the product.
Imagine your sales rep going into one of your big customer accounts:
Sales Rep: "Check out the new version of our product. It has 8 new features that are important to you!"
Customer: "Yes, but your competitor's product has those features plus two others. Why should I choose your product instead of theirs?"
Sales Rep: "That may be true, but we almost completed those two features, plus five others! We have seven other features almost in the product!"
Of course, the customer doesn't care about those other partially completed features. Partial baskets are still worth 0 points. So if the customer doesn't care about partially completed features, why do you?
Why do you track and report a "percentage complete" metric for your tasks? Why do you go into a status meeting and report that your project is 50% done? You cannot sell a feature, or a project, or a task that is less than 100% complete, so why do you measure for it?
One of my most prized learnings from Peter Drucker's "Management" book was this basic principle: Performance measurement should be focused on measuring things that matter to the customer. That's why I try to stay away from recognizing partial completion, and why you should too.
Organizations that can focus around this line of thinking will find that they become more in tune with their customers because they are continually thinking about their offering from the customer's point of view. Thinking about a feature as 80% complete is thinking about it from the individual contributor's point of view. On a 10-week project, the individual contributor has done 8 weeks of work so they are 80% complete. They want those 8 weeks to matter; of course they do. But those 8 weeks don't matter to your customer unless the other two weeks of work are also complete and the project is actually finished and shipped. Customers don't care about partial completion; they think in binary, even if they don't understand it. Complete. Not complete. Those are the only two states that matter to a customer.
Those are the only two states that should matter to you, too.
