Comment Metrics - A lazy manager's out every time. (Score 3, Insightful) 315
Falling back to metrics is a lazy manager's way of proving to her superiors that her drones are operating at peak efficiency. The most lazy of all will rely on utterly meaningless metrics such as the number of help tickets closed per day, per individual per day, etc. A metric such as this is completely useless as all tickets don't require an equal amount of effort to complete. Diagnosing a problem due to an intermittent hardware issue doesn't take the same amount of effort as helping a user change their password. Unfortunately these types of issues generally comprise the vast majority of tickets generated and therefore often end up being the ones that are 'measured. ' This often leads to a drop in morale and thereby negatively impacts performance; ironically the opposite of what the whole exercise is attempting to accomplish.
Trouble ticket data is primarily useful for detecting trends, thereby helping an IT team appropriately focus their human capital on issues that will enable their users to be more efficient. Going back to the password issue above, the speed and alacrity with which the IT staff help users change their passwords isn't a useful metric at all. A more meaningful metric would be the frequency of password change requests before and after the installation of a self-service password reset solution that was put in place in response to the analysis of help ticket data that showed that this was one of the most frequent issues and one that could be easily solved with little effort and financial expenditure. Measuring a sharp drop in password reset requests would show that the solution worked and was therefore beneficial to the organization by enabling users to help themselves, resulting in their having more time to concentrate on their primary tasks, and also by allowing IT staff to allocate their resources on issues that are less amenable to resolution via automation.
Unfortunately, in my experience, ticket systems get used to determine useless metrics such as the first example mentioned above, and therefore end up being the bane of IT staff, rather than a useful analytical tool.