It's really hard to not create perverse incentives with KPIs. Targets like "% of tickets closed within 72 hours" can wreck service quality if the team is under enough pressure or unscrupulous.

Generaly speaking, an easy solution is to attach another target to either the nominator or denominator, a target that requires people to move that in value in acertqin direction. That might even be a different team thanthe one having goals on the ratio.

These are good in that they’re directly aligned with business outcomes but you still need sensible judgement in the loop. For example, say there’s an ice storm or heat wave which affects delivery times for a large region – you need someone smart enough to recognize that and not robotically punish people for failing to hit a now-unrealistic goal, or you’re going to see things like people marking orders as canceled or faking deliveries to avoid penalties or losing bonuses.

One example I saw at a large old school vendor was having performance measured directly by units delivered, which might seem reasonable since it’s totally aligned with the company’s interests, except that they were hit by a delay on new CPUs and so most of their customers were waiting for the latest product. Some sales people were penalized and left, and the cagier ones played games having their best clients order the old stuff, never unpack it, and return it on the first day of the next quarter - they got the max internal discount for their troubles so that circus cost way more money than doing nothing would have, but that number was law and none of the senior managers were willing to provide nuance.

My organization tracks how many tickets we have had open for 30 days or more. So my team started to close tickets after 30 days and let them reopen automatically.

Of course the actual behavior in the article is highly disturbing.