The Metrics-Obsessed Management Environment

Caveat: This article, and most articles in this blog regarding management and how to deal with them, use management jargon. I'll try to call out jargon by putting it "in quotes".

One of the manager's primary tasks is to communicate with... his management. He needs to be able to summarize the current state of his team and explain how well or poorly the team is doing in a concise manner.

This usually means numbers. Managers like numbers, and the higher up the management food chain you go, the more those numbers are used to explain how things are going.  In the end, numbers are used to explain the state of the entire company to shareholders.

Consequently, managers of Tech Support teams like to find ways to apply numbers to what the team does - assist customers - and generate as many different types of numbers as possible. This is what I call the MOME, or Metrics-Obsessed Management Environment.

Numbers and data are the best protection in a MOME. The more numbers and data you have, the easier it will be to respond to any questions and concerns your manager (who is, after all, answering questions from his manager) may bring up.

The most common metric imposed upon a Tech Support reps is the simplest one to count: the number of calls, emails or other customer contacts made in a day.  In some systems, this is automatically compiled by the program used to track the calls or emails. In some cases, though, it isn't.  This is where writing everything down comes in handy.

If you know the number of calls, emails or contacts that is set as the base, or minimum average, writing down your cases - even just jotting a quick summary on a pad somewhere - can help you keep an eye on how you're doing with what I've heard called the "Salary Continuation Program".  If you find yourself falling behind, notes on the nature of the case will help you spot problem areas either in your handling of the case or perhaps an issue with the product or service which should be brought to the attention of your engineers, management, or other higher powers.

The second most common metric is call times, or calls / emails per hour. This one is a little trickier to manage from the Tech Support rep side, but if you know how many calls or emails you do in a day, you can take that number, divide it by the number of hours you are "in production" (that is, working on customer issues) and get a rough estimate.  Again, if you find your "per hour" metric isn't matching up to what management sets as their expectation, you can look over your notes and use the types of cases you worked and the nature of the issues to provide some context for the numbers themselves.  Managers like it when a rep "proactively" spots, analyzes, and defines "areas for improvement" before a manager has to bring it to his attention.

Most Tech Support reps see all these metrics as the enemy. But, if you're willing to put in a little effort, you can get them on your side.