This reminds me of the standard problem off measuring programmers'' productivity. If some high level manager gets to do what they think would work, you end up with something like counting lines, or bug fixes per day without any regard for the bug size. You'll get measured that way against the other teams/members. Isn't that pretty close to what you're describing? Maybe it's a similar issue? Maybe people are just fooling themselves that you can reduce this problem to any meaningful single dimension?