The company produced around 3-4,000 websites a year. Developers had a monthly quota. If you didn't make quota two months in a row, you got put on a PIP (performance improvement plan). If you didn't make quota the next three months in a row, you were let go. It was a total meat grinder to say the least.

The increase in productivity was directly related to the increase in quotas month over month. It started at 18 sites per month, then was elevated 4 months in a row until it got to 22 and then more and more people started missing the quota, so they backed it down after developers started leaving, or just gave up. Thus, you had an increase in production while upper management essentially found the breaking point of the team, then rest the quota right under that level.

I think upper management thought by giving us something like ROWE, we could continue to burn the candle at each ends so to speak, and not have our managers breathing down our backs about metrics and still make quota since we could work at home at our own pace and on the hours of our choosing. One of the developers surmised it was because they figured if everybody was out of the office and at their homes - we wouldn't talk so much to each other to figure out how really bad it was.

Yeah if it raised production 11% and 5 managers were no longer needed, that would be a substantial savings. Why would upper management revert from ROWE?

One reason would be an assumption that ROWE requires a manager like the person that quit to maintain it, and without him, the production would drop through the floor. Upper management were conservatively rolling back to what worked before him.

I think it requires more skillful management. How do you measure results? It's much easier to count the hours people spend in the office or how often they repeat a predefined process even if that process is inefficient.

Lobbying from the remaining middle management?