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Because it's the easiest thing to observe and measure, controlling effort tends to be the path of least resistance for a manager. We choose policies tending to ensure that no one slacks off, that everybody is working as hard as they can. The picture we might have in mind is rowers in a boat, or better a tug-of-war team - people pulling on a rope with different strengths, but each pulling as hard as they can.

The problem with such policies is that, in software development, it routinely happens that effort correlates not at all with value delivered. People work very hard and end up having nothing of value to show for it. Each time that happens, we are baffled - how could that happen ? It happens because we pictured the team as a tug-of-war team, and that is not the appropriate model for the work that a software team does. Such work requires striking a balance between contradictory directions, rather than everyone pulling hard in the same direction.

Picture instead a team - say, six people - arranged in a circle around a round manhole. Each person on the team is holding on to one end of a rope, the other end being attached to a four- or five-foot pole which dangles into the manhole. The team's objective is that the lower end of the pole should NOT, under any circumstance, touch the walls of the manhole, while keeping the upper end as high as possible.

This is constructed as an exercise in balance. The team's collective responsibility is to keep the pole centered. If someone pulls too hard on their end of the rope, they will cause the team to fail just as surely as if they failed to pull hard enough. "Work" in this metaphor is achieved by pulling hard. "Value" is achieved by keeping the pole dead center and high.

The objective cannot be achieved by any one individual "giving it his all", or any two, and so on. Three pulling hard enough may be able to compensate for the other three not pulling at all, if they were placed in the proper symmetry - but that would be such a waste. Similarly, the team could maintain control by exerting varying amounts of effort - everyone pulling as hard as they could would be one way, if they were all more or less matched in strength; but you'd get just as good a result if everyone agreed to pull as lightly as they could given the weight of the pole, taking care to compensate for small variations.

Manage value, not effort.