In September 1999, inside a control room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, a group of engineers gathered to watch a years-long, $125 million mission reach its climax.
The Mars Climate Orbiter — a spacecraft built to study the Martian atmosphere — was scheduled to enter orbit at precisely 8:45 AM. Telemetry signals from deep space trickled in as the team monitored the craft’s position. Coffee-fueled and exhausted, they waited for confirmation it had safely slipped into orbit.
The signal never came.
Instead, silence. Then confusion. And, eventually, a dawning horror as calculations showed the spacecraft had dipped too low into the Martian atmosphere, burned up, and scattered itself across a planet 54.6 million kilometers away.
The culprit wasn’t some catastrophic hardware failure or undetected programming bug.
It was a simple, maddening human error.
One engineering team had been using metric units (newtons) to calculate thrust. Another used imperial units (pound-force). Nobody noticed the mismatch. Nobody double-checked whether the numbers feeding critical navigation calculations were speaking the same language.
And so, after months of flawless work, the Mars Climate Orbiter was reduced to cosmic litter — not because of incompetence, but because no one was tracking the one thing that mattered at exactly the moment it mattered most.
The moral is; the small stuff will kill you, and you’ll never see it coming if you’re staring at the wrong numbers.
Your Business Isn’t NASA — But You’re Not Safe Either
You might not be launching spacecraft, but if you’ve ever run a project, you know this dynamic.
Two teams chasing different goals. A budget spiraling while everyone insists things are fine. Scope creeping one harmless “tiny tweak” at a time until deadlines buckle. And through it all, reports and dashboards filled with numbers that are technically accurate — but practically useless.
It’s not a question of whether you have data, but whether you’re tracking the right things at the right moments.
That’s what good KPIs are for. Not to impress stakeholders with pie charts, but to catch the dangerous stuff before it costs you money, people, or sleep.
KPIs: Not the Dashboard Clutter You Think
A lot of people hate KPIs because they’ve only seen them done badly.
Massive dashboards listing thirty metrics, updated in meetings no one pays attention to, measuring things nobody cares about. Number of hours worked. Number of emails sent. Number of meetings held. Great for activity, terrible for delivery health.
A useful KPI does one thing: it tells you when something important is about to go wrong.
It gives you just enough time to steer away from the fire before you’re pulling an all-nighter.
And you don’t need twenty of them.
A good project runs on a handful of sharp, well-targeted KPIs that everyone knows and watches like their job depends on it. Because it probably does.
What Should You Actually Measure?
Forget vanity metrics. Measure the stuff that quietly unravels projects if ignored. Here’s a shortlist:
1. Time-to-resource
How fast can you fill a critical role when someone leaves, gets sick, or you realize you’re short a specialist? Every extra day waiting hurts velocity and morale.
2. Predictability Rate
Not how many tickets you closed. How often you delivered what you said you would, when you said you would. Projects live or die on predictability, not busyness.
3. Scope Creep Ratio
How much extra work snuck into your sprint, milestone, or project without extra resources, budget, or deadline adjustments? It happens quietly.
4. Issue Resolution Speed
Every issue lingering unresolved is compound damage. Track how long it takes to move from “problem raised” to “problem sorted.” Faster is always better.
5. Ecosystem Load Capacity
How stretched are your people, systems, and processes right now? Is your team one emergency away from breaking? You need a number for that.
Final Thought
The Mars Climate Orbiter didn’t fail because NASA didn’t care, or because their teams were incompetent. But it failed, and it failed because no one was watching the crucial detail at the crucial time.
Your projects won’t blow up as spectacularly. But make no mistake, if you’re not tracking what really matters, they’ll bleed out the same way. Slowly, quietly, and very painfully.
KPIs are the headlights in the fog. If you’re serious about delivery, you track the right numbers.
