Frederick Taylor gets a bad rap these days. As you’ll remember, he started the whole Scientific Management movement. Unfortunately, his conclusions are also credited with the onset of sweatshops and inhumane working conditions. Recently I was in a meeting where one person conjectured that it was Fredrick Taylor who was responsible for Foxconn, which has received its share of bad press lately.

But I would argue that Taylor’s real contribution to management was measurement and the ultimate conclusion that “what gets measured gets improved.” This is one of the first things students learn in B-school, and most of us spend our careers trying to figure out what to measure. Sure he made other contributions, but sometimes the simplest are the most profound.

This question of what to measure can be particularly thorny for project managers. Since projects are unique by definition, we don’t have a baseline against which to compare. “Is it okay that this task took ten days?” Is that too long? How do I know?” Since most of us don’t know, we only have one or two meaningful measures: schedule and budget.

If you are wrestling with what to measure and how to measure it on your project, one quick solution is to simply track people’s results against their estimates. This will provide very useful information for the project manager and can be a great place to start. After all, who doesn’t want to get better at estimating?

The payoff is that you get better, and contrary to some popular fears, getting more efficient doesn’t have to lead to becoming Foxconn.