Yeah this also sounds like part of the "MBA-ification" of business.
I think a lot of this comes from a reasonable goal to have: if can find appropriate metrics which represent the work your company is doing, this should give you a reasonably objective way of measuring how different interventions move you closer to or farther from your goal.
But I think the problem is that actually finding and implementing those metrics is a bit of a pipe dream in most cases. A lot of these metrics which people come up with to try to measure productivity - story points, ticket flow, time-on-task - are all fairly subjective, and not very good proxies for measuring actual value creation.
I think it gets worse in orgs where there's a disconnect between management and the workforce which is actually getting things done. Often times, upper management only has these artificial metrics to evaluate the performance of a team. A lot of company cultures put management in a bit of a bubble, so middle managers have more of a focus on conversations with other people in that management layer, who are metrics focused, rather than dealing with development teams, who are actually engaged with the product.
As a result, the "ground truth" for management becomes the metrics, and you start to see really silly things happen because the metrics matter more than the product.
I think a lot of this comes from a reasonable goal to have: if can find appropriate metrics which represent the work your company is doing, this should give you a reasonably objective way of measuring how different interventions move you closer to or farther from your goal.
But I think the problem is that actually finding and implementing those metrics is a bit of a pipe dream in most cases. A lot of these metrics which people come up with to try to measure productivity - story points, ticket flow, time-on-task - are all fairly subjective, and not very good proxies for measuring actual value creation.
I think it gets worse in orgs where there's a disconnect between management and the workforce which is actually getting things done. Often times, upper management only has these artificial metrics to evaluate the performance of a team. A lot of company cultures put management in a bit of a bubble, so middle managers have more of a focus on conversations with other people in that management layer, who are metrics focused, rather than dealing with development teams, who are actually engaged with the product.
As a result, the "ground truth" for management becomes the metrics, and you start to see really silly things happen because the metrics matter more than the product.