Undocumented Features

If You Manage By Metrics, What You Measure is All You Will Be Good At

December 22, 2007 – 3:06 pm

Metrics are an important aspect of management.  Number of software defects per cycle, measurement of budget and timeline efficiency… the list of useful things that you can measure to help you understand what needs your attention goes on and on.  Always remember, though, two things about measurements:  1) it is only one tool in your toolbox, and 2) if you start monitoring any measurable, people will devote extra time to making that metric look good- possibly at the expense of other things.

Let’s consider a basic example.  In company X, wait time for customers calling in for support is way up.  The call center is packed; there’s no room to add staff.  Even if there was, there’s no budget to do so.  The busy season for customers is coming up; everyone knows that call volumes will be up soon.

So what happens?  Management announces that they will start monitoring call times.  They want to see the amount of time per call reduced.  Armed with this mandate, help desk managers start communicating this to helpdesk workers.  Get the call times down; you will be graded.

What will this lead to?  In my experience, this will usually lead to the helpdesk workers working harder to end the call and working less hard at properly solving customer problems.  The result will be more repeat callers and more frustrated customers.  In the mean time, call times will go down.  Call volume will go up.  Everyone will point to the fact that they correctly predicted that call volume will go up and pat themselves on the back for successfully getting call times down.  In the meantime, they’re ruining their relationship with their customers, and they don’t even realize it.

What was the right thing to do here?  One good solution is to launch a specific effort to improve the analysis going on at the helpdesk, so that you can reduce call times and reduce repeat callers.  Look for ways to make your people more efficient- don’t just mandate it with a statistic.

The lesson here is be careful what you monitor and how you monitor it.  Monitoring a statistic will usually make the statistic better, but it will not typically solve any actual business problems.  Monitoring should always be accompanied by a specific plan to do what you are monitoring better.

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