Be careful what you wish for

If you don’t measure it you can’t improve it.

That was what a previous senior manager of mine used to say. I was working in a

customer service centre and part of my role was to collate the measurements that

were used to evaluate the team’s performance.

The team was split in two: One half took incoming phone calls, the other half dealt

with written communication. This was in the mid 1990’s and written meant paper.

Email was just starting to become adopted internally and the workflow used a

fledgling digital system. Customer’s letters would be scanned automatically and

those scans added to a queue to be dealt with in turn.

That queue also had requests from the phone team that were deemed complex and