RE: The Pressure to Perform – SQLServerCentral

SSC Guru

Points: 124210

November 23, 2017 at 7:27 pm

#1969368

David.Poole - Thursday, November 23, 2017 12:19 AM
You get what you bonus for. It is very hard to design any benefit or incentive scheme that achieves its aim without highly undesirable consequences.
An example would be Payment Protection Insurance in the UK, endowment mortgages and with profits policies.
If you bonussed IT on bugs corrected you'd just get buggier software.
Most people abide by the spirit of a system but enough people game the system to break it utterly. There will always be a few that will far exceed the bounds of morality or even legality.
I have seen people being richly rewarded for shadow IT activity and IT be the lucky recipients of the support duties. Then IT get blamed when that solution broke, tool time to"fix" and thereafter bled at least one day a week out of resource for what they were budgeted to do

Agreed. I've seen this a lot. I find that the things that are easy to measure are the most likely to be what you are graded on, never mind what bad outcomes those measures encourage. Sadly I have also found that the easiest things to measure are usually the ones that add the least to the value of what you are contributing.

So when you encourage speed of delivery over quality (because quality is *hard to measure*) and then you reward those who fix bugs (even if they caused the bugs), you can't really be surprised by the consequences.

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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?