One of the very first companies I worked at was a local exchange carrier, back in the days those were a thing, and there was supposed to be a certain maximum nu

One of the very first companies I worked at was a local exchange carrier, back in the days those were a thing, and there was supposed to be a certain maximum number of days between the time an order was placed for a new line and the time the line was operational. (These were lines like frame relay drops, fractional or full T1s, etc., so fulfilling the order often required coordinating with other providers, colocation facilities, and so on.) But nobody was actually formally measuring this. I created a spreadsheet which actually calculated the metrics by querying a database for recent orders, showing which ones were still open and how long they'd been open for, and what the distributions of placement-to-fulfillment times were, and it turned out we were only hitting our own internal targets about half of the time. They didn't know that. There was a vague sense they weren't hitting all the targets, but there was no sense they were missing half the targets, in some cases by a lot. Maybe you can make a case that it was a very bad no good horrible thing for me to have done, but I'm going to respond that if you want your company to survive the next two years, you need to be know whether your company is doing the thing it is in business to do. Sure, it's really easy to use metrics to create negative incentives. That's not an argument against using metrics. It's an argument against using metrics badly.