Bryan Ramirez <brwhy...@gmail.com> writes: > Moving this over to this mailing list... > > My boss was asked to come up with metrics by which to measure how > much/well his team is working. I have some ideas, but without much time > to think about it and without much experience with such things, I'm > afraid of creating bad incentives (closing tickets fast, making > everything into a ticket, covering up problems..). Does anyone have a > set of metrics that they use to "measure" the work of a sysadmin team > that they like? Do they have metrics that they don't like? Why?
Why don't you go solve the traveling salesman problem in polynomial time? It's a really difficult problem. To measure behavior is to change it, even if you don't add monitary incentives; the trick is to get people to focus on doing their job better rather than 'hot potatoing' the problem off on someone else, or lawyering about who's fault it is, and just by adding metrics, you are giving your SysAdmins something to focus on other than doing their job well, so if the metric isn't set and supervised just right, it is going to make things worse, rather than better. I can tell you that simple ticket metrics are absolutely the wrong thing to do; even at prgmr.com, the person who closes the most tickets does the least work. I have one guy who is maybe a bit more, ah, organized than the rest of us, and he ends up doing a lot of 'Oh, is this done? here, let me verify and close that ticket for you.' which is great, but it destroys the usefulness of ticket metrics. At other places I've worked, I've seen ticket metrics used almost maliciously. You want to get the metric as close as possible to the job you want your team actually doing; For a team of SysAdmins, I think measuring uptime (not uptime(1) - measuring the availability of the servers or services the SysAdmins support) might be the best thing to do, if you can do that in a way that encourages your sysadmins to push for more reliable systems/gear. -- Luke S. Crawford http://prgmr.com/xen/ - Hosting for the technically adept http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - We don't assume you are stupid. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
