KPI’s — key performance indicators. Also called metrics. Also called data.
We constantly hear about KPI’s and data-driven decisions, especially when measuring the peformance of teams and individuals. We should be using data to make decisions (business, personal, national, etc.). Data provides valuable insight.
But there is a downside.
Let’s consider a help desk. Common KPI’s for help desk workers and organizations is the number of tickets closed and the time to closure. That seems reasonable, right? More tickets closed faster seems like a great method to measure performance.
However, in practice, the individuals and the team begin to operate in ways that artificially skew the results — convert single customer tickets into multiple tickets, artificially close tickets early and open new ones, etc.
The problem isn’t the metric itself. The problem is the team’s knowledge of the metric.
As such, these KPI’s are only useful in hindsight to measure past performance. Once the team knows, those metrics cease to be as useful.
With good intentions, we’ve incentivized bad behavior. Not intentionally. Nor are the people bad actors or bad people. They are simply acting according to the systemic incentives.
We usually get what we incentivize. But are we sure the indicator measures the true performance?
