(I'm a big fan of IT people. Also, nobody likes measuring things more than me. But interpretation is everything. Or rather, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.)
I once worked in a company where an IT team of three people provided technical support to about 1,000 employees. One of the IT guys was great and the other two were really bad. By bad, I mean that when an employee asked them to fix a problem on their PC, these two guys typically couldn't fix the problem and often also created new problems.
Then one day the good IT guy got fired. We learned later that the company had instituted metrics to measure performance of the IT department, and had determined that this fellow was too slow: metrics showed that it took him two or three times longer, on average, to close a case.
What everyone in the company knew (except, apparently, IT management), was that the good IT guy took all the complex and difficult problems, while the other two guys dealt with the sort of mundane issues they could handle. Difficult problems take longer.
I might have just passed this off as incredible stupidity, but the next company I went to also had three people in the IT department. They were extremely overworked (causing delays that affected productivity all over the company), but one day one of them got laid off. We learned later that the company had instituted metrics to measure performance of the IT department, and the metrics showed that there wasn't enough work for three. The metrics system only covered issues that were logged through a web site, but employees mostly just called IT without logging an issue.
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