The wrong targets
A team can hit every target it's given and still be measuring the wrong things. Goodhart's Law applies to service desks too.
Insights and thoughts Andrew Wood
A team can hit every target it’s given and still be measuring the wrong things.
In 2007, Adam Curtis made a documentary for BBC Two called The Trap, which looked at what happened when New Labour introduced rigid performance targets across the public sector. The intent was accountability, but the result was a masterclass in Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
To hit the four-hour A&E waiting time target, some NHS trusts kept patients waiting in ambulances outside the hospital doors so the clock wouldn’t start ticking. To meet targets on trolley waits, hospitals literally unbolted the wheels from trolleys and reclassified them as beds, or renamed corridors as clinical observation wards. GP surgeries hit the target for seeing patients within 48 hours by refusing to let anyone book an appointment more than two days in advance. Every dashboard turned green, while the actual experience for patients got worse.
IT service delivery falls into the exact same trap whenever leadership confuses metrics with outcomes. Push a service desk purely on first-response SLA, and you get automated “we are looking into your issue” replies that tell the customer nothing. Measure engineers strictly on ticket closure volume, and simple requests get split into five separate tickets while complex root-cause problems are left to rot at the bottom of the queue. Penalise breached SLAs too heavily without looking at context, and tickets magically get placed “on hold, awaiting customer” at 4:45pm on a Friday with a pointless question just to pause the clock.
I’ve hit targets earlier in my career that I’d now question. They tracked activity well enough, but they said very little about whether customers were actually better off.
For a delivery leader, churn, engineering productivity and genuine customer satisfaction tell you far more. They tell you whether clients stay, whether the team can keep up without burning out, and whether anyone would actually recommend you. Admitting your own targets were wrong is uncomfortable, but it’s much better than spending another year gaming them.