One of the most important metrics I use to measure success on projects is highly subjective: Noise Ratio. Essentially, it comes down to how much yelling did we expect to happen went we rolled the solution out versus how much did we actually receive. If you hear less noise from leaders, managers, and employees than you expected, generally you have wrapped up a successful project. If there is more noise than expected, something was missed or expectations were not appropriately set.
But the real reason I like the metric is that it helps to remind the team that there is always noise. Someone will always complain about something or yell that something else is broken. As the saying goes, you can’t please everyone. Therefore, go in expecting the noise so your own expectations are appropriately set for what success sounds like.
This is easy to do on big projects, but it also applies to all of the things we do daily. Email is a noise signal. Getting more emails in a day may feel to some as if they are now more involved than they were before but to others, it may feel like an avalanche they will never crawl out from under. The reality is that the email volume is just a signal of something. It is up to each of us to interpret that signal and cut through it if it is not aligned with reality.
None of us can avoid noise around us in what we do. What we can each do is set our own expectations of what the right level should be so that we can use it to measure how we are doing.