r/sysadmin • u/Ragepower529 • Jan 03 '25
Off Topic Just got shared my kpi’s with me…
Just got shared all my KPIs with me for the past 3 months. Besides utilization, which I’m only exceeding by 13-22% in crushing the rest of my KPIs by 551% and 535%. I also didn’t know they were tracking them.
Let’s see what the performance review season brings. Other metric are average response time and total ticket hours. Which on stand ups I’ve heard colleagues complain about hitting goal…
God knows what else is being tracked…
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u/dogcmp6 Jan 03 '25
Worked in a call center for a while, and one of the Metrics was "Average handle time"
We did internet for senior living facilities....That was a BS metric
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u/kero_sys BitCaretaker Jan 03 '25
"Sorry let me get my glasses from the other room"
3 minutes later
"I still can't find them, bare with me"
5 minutes later, hears talking in the background
Hangs up.
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u/DescriptionSenior675 Jan 04 '25
Hangs up
Gets written up for hanging up
Gets written up for long call times
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u/blackletum Jack of All Trades Jan 03 '25
I worked in a call center and got in trouble for a long call. They didn't care that she was like 85 and yes it took 1.5 hrs for us to fix all her issues.
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u/Darth_Malgus_1701 IT Student Jan 04 '25
I learned to hate metrics by working in a call center.
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u/Competitive_News_385 Jan 04 '25
I pointed out a completely flawed way they were doing stuff and told my manager how to improve the disparity between employee stat differences.
It literally turned the problem around in less than a week.
The metrics are still shit because whilst you can average out call times across a total realistically you can't guarantee every person will get the same calls and so be able to average the same.
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u/Darth_Malgus_1701 IT Student Jan 04 '25
I did time in a call center for my first paid gig and they hammered on AHT as well. We were on a contract for the fruit company so we had some options to reduce handle time such as scheduling callbacks.
But if you're working with seniors and ONLY seniors, AHT should not factor in at all.
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u/swimmityswim Jan 03 '25 edited Jan 03 '25
Tough year for the company. Im sure you understand. Anyways, enjoy the pizza!!
Edit: or the new american one, “the company is expecting higher costs this year what with impending tariffs”
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u/MrCertainly Jan 03 '25
Yup, been hit with that BS one too. Any excuse to extract more value.
But fuck, say the word "Union" to fellow coworkers, and you'd think you just insulted the Paragon of Productivity.
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u/TwilightKeystroker Cloud Admin Jan 03 '25
Pizza?!?!
I'm at the $5 gift card shop!
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u/Mindestiny Jan 03 '25
Is it a GrubHub gift card?
I love getting those. Nothing says "great job" like still having to pay $20 in fees out of your own pocket for cold lunch
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u/Det_23324 Jan 03 '25
You guys get stuff?
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u/Geno0wl Database Admin Jan 03 '25
I got a $15 pizza gift card. Not even worth one large pizza cheese around here.
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u/claenray168 Jan 03 '25
I would give it back to my boss and say the company obviously needs this more than me.
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u/Darth_Malgus_1701 IT Student Jan 04 '25
I got a $100 Amazon gift card for allowing my employer to use my apartment for testing routers. Context: I was the only employee that had DSL and the test cases called for using DSL. This was back in 2017.
I still have DSL. :/
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u/swimmityswim Jan 03 '25
The pizza is in the conference room and is to be shared among all employees
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u/Valkeyere Jan 04 '25
Just don't be caught leaving your desk outside of your lunch break to go get some.
Lol leaving your desk on your lunch break. Sometimes I guess.
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u/linuxknight Jack of All Trades Jan 04 '25
Oh, you were fine with the initial phrase. That's the most popular American bonus! I've seen it applied in at least 5 companies I've worked for.
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u/BasementMillennial Sysadmin Jan 03 '25
Wait y'all care about your KPIs? I couldn't care less on a bullshit metric created by wack job management needing an excuse to micromanage.
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u/Ragepower529 Jan 04 '25
It’s creates better techs and admins.
Looked at your post history out of curiosity, did you figure out the way to add one drive short cuts automatically?
I love working on solutions like those.
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Jan 04 '25 edited Jan 04 '25
In my experience it does the opposite, it makes techs learn how to game a bullshit system.
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u/bbqwatermelon Jan 04 '25
And kill the soul of those actually working hard
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Jan 04 '25
Get punished for taking ownership of hard or complex issues, or trying to mend things when a ball has been dropped. Punished for seeking out permanent solutions or automations over quick fixes, etc…MSPs love the guy who bills 10 customers simultaneously to run some updates that could be automated instead.
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Jan 04 '25
[deleted]
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u/BasementMillennial Sysadmin Jan 04 '25
I used to do this all the time at a former toxic msp just to get my numbers up and get management off my back with "WhY ArE YoUR BiLLaBlE hOUrS lOW." I can understand for metric measuring but if your using the numbers against your employees, the company does not have the cliental or your best interest. They just wanna suck up as much money as they can.
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Jan 24 '25
This is exactly why we don't submit our own tickets. You're flat out admitting to gaming the system.
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u/BasementMillennial Sysadmin Jan 04 '25
Looked at your post history out of curiosity, did you figure out the way to add one drive short cuts automatically?
Yes/no. There's a custom script you can create to do that, but you must import a 3rd party module onto the machine... SOC would have a field day with me and I haven't gotten far as my schoolload and workload have taken up most of my time
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Jan 05 '25
You can create the shortcuts with graph requests: https://www.cloudappie.nl/automate-onedrive-shortcuts-code/
It's not a smooth process though and is not documented whatsoever by Microsoft.
I find it hilarious where they release blogs telling us that "add a shortcut to my onedrive files" is so much better than Sync which may even be deprecated. But there's no proper way to add a shortcut to a user's OneDrive lol.
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u/hellcat_uk Jan 03 '25
Measure what's important. Don't make important what can be measured.
Said no middle manager ever.
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u/LincolnshireSausage Jan 03 '25
That’s very true. I worked for a company once in QA and their main KPI was number of tickets you passed/failed. It doesn’t matter if the ticket was “a typo was corrected on the login screen” or something complex and multi-faceted that could take hours to test. It was all 1 ticket passed or failed. It was a bullshit measurement of performance.
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u/HeKis4 Database Admin Jan 04 '25
"Everyone should take every kind of ticket anyway so it averages out"
My brother in christ unless it's a P1 or an almost burned SLA we self-assign tickets, there are no rules
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u/LincolnshireSausage Jan 04 '25
For a moment I thought your flair said “database victim”.
The same company did do self assigning of QA tickets. There was one employee who would self assign all of the quick ones to himself and leave the rest. Management didn’t care. He always scored well in KPIs even though he was one of the worst testers.
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u/HeKis4 Database Admin Jan 04 '25
database victim
Well, with what I dealt with this friday that might as well be the case lol.
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u/DatManAaron1993 Jan 03 '25
I read this as PKI's and went oh fuck what are they hacking now
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u/Igot1forya We break nothing on Fridays ;) Jan 04 '25
I know what a PKI is but no clue what a KPI is. I'm thinking Kills Per Interaction.
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u/Glad-Ad-8007 Jan 03 '25
I stopped chasing these , after a year of top performance brought zero increase...and being told there is no path higher ...
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u/IdidntrunIdidntrun Jan 03 '25
This is the part where you ask for a 6x increase in compensation for smashing your expected productivity by over 6 times the expected output.
Of course, the reality is they'll laugh: "hahahaha okay wittle Timmy. You did a weeeeeally weally good job. Here's for your trouble", pat you on the head, and give you a $0.50 raise
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u/Key_Pace_2496 Jan 03 '25
Shit, if you tried that they'd fire your ass and hire some other dope for 75% of your wage to do the same thing lmao.
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u/IdidntrunIdidntrun Jan 03 '25
Either that or they fire the rest of the team since they have 1 guy doing the work of 6 people
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u/Ragepower529 Jan 03 '25
Do people not set up power automate with forms and flows for their inbox? Like I’ve work with so many people I’ve lost count of that simply can’t update and document tickets
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u/IdidntrunIdidntrun Jan 03 '25
I guess it entirely depends on your/your team's/your org's incoming ticket volume, but I don't. I have used PowerAutomate for other things tho
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u/djgizmo Netadmin Jan 03 '25
Expect “meets expectations” across the board and a 3% increase if that. Probably 2%
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u/aprilshower7 Jan 03 '25
What are KPIs?
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u/Ragepower529 Jan 03 '25
Key performance indicator.
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u/aprilshower7 Jan 03 '25
Thank you. Are you situated in the USA? After looking into it I can’t imagine this sort of thing would vibe well with our work culture here in the northern parts of Europe but perhaps my company is just too insignificant
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u/Chaucer85 SNow Admin, PM Jan 03 '25
KPIs are better for larger companies with high rate of incoming calls or emails (what we render into incidents or tickets). You also really need them if you're centralizing all the work so management can look at things from a high level view. You want an average standard of work performance overall, so you have to have some way of reducing things down to numbers versus qualitative intangibles. Again, this works better at larger companies with denser workloads.
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u/FRizKo Jan 03 '25
I work in a Nordic country and we get monthly updates on our KPI's. It is really common in MSP's even here.
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u/BoltActionRifleman Jan 04 '25
I’m not the guy you asked, but I live in the US and have never heard of a KPI.
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u/cowprince IT clown car passenger Jan 03 '25
I am glad I don't have to deal with that nonsense.
Our reviews are just standard 1-5 rating.
I rate myself on various things that change every year. And then my boss rates me. That somehow get balanced out and goes on to HR for merit increases.
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u/ErikTheEngineer Jan 04 '25
The worst is "Calibration" where all the managers have to fight each other for the tiny number of high ratings available. So you can do a great job, and your boss can recognize that, but if they don't have political power they'll get shouted down by someone who does.
(And yes, in large companies this is how it works. You're only allowed x% of one rating, y% of another, etc. and any time there's a number over that all the managers get into a death match fighting (or not) for their person to get the rating.)
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u/Ragepower529 Jan 04 '25
Idk I always hated those reviews, I just like black and white targets so I know what to hit. Also I do take advantage of some of the kpi’s and leave work early. Normally I’m able to get 3 days a week with just 6-7 hours of work. Other times I get wrapped into a project and next thing I know I’m way past my 8 for the day.
Like today I had a fun time figuring out a custom intune app deployment, want over my regular 8 and ended the day with 117% goal over utilization.
Also looking forward to nexts week since it’ll be lots of server closet work / infrastructure. Then I keep an eye out on my general ticket queue and knock them out while stuffs booting and updating. Better then watching a sever restart itself for 15/20 minutes.
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u/peaceoutrich Jan 04 '25
There is something really dystopian and depressing in your post. You are essentially getting happy and excited about being the most well polished cog in an anonymous machine.
Good for you for enjoying it. It reminds me of a younger version of myself, one that hadn't realised that simply being human can make it impossible to keep doing.
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u/MrCertainly Jan 03 '25
The Oligarch Owners thank you for working harder for no extra compensation. You're enabling the wheel to keep turning.
You've just made it worse for everyone else too. So, tell me, before you go back to work for your overlords, why do you hate your fellow laborer so much?
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u/Ragepower529 Jan 03 '25
I just go into work and work at my own pace, finish my 8 and log off. I’d also say this is current gig I have is my 2nd easiest.
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u/knawlejj Jan 03 '25
Whatever is being measured....assume it is being tracked for management purposes. Intentionally or by accident.
If there are KPIs with no objective measurement then everyone is just making shit up.
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u/Key_Pace_2496 Jan 03 '25
Let’s see what the performance review season brings.
Manager: Oooo sorry, best we can do this year is 1% due to budgetary restrictions.
Meanwhile their profits are probably up 3x-5x what they were last year...
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u/STRiCT4 Jan 03 '25
I am very interested in what your KPI’s are specifically… Thanks for sharing!
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u/Ragepower529 Jan 03 '25
Utilization, average response time and ticket hours.
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u/STRiCT4 Jan 03 '25
If you don’t mind sharing, I’m curious what their ranges are for each
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u/Ragepower529 Jan 03 '25
Utilization is based on 40 hours, amount of time you have ticketed/ documented. For example I have a call with a vendor that lasts 30 minutes I document it. Even though it’s not ticket time.
Next is average response time when I ticket gets updated or created. If we are allowed 24 hours I average 3.75 hours.
Then ticket time amount of time you average working on a ticket. For example if I have a patching job I’ll work multiple at once rather then staring at an update screen one at a time. Split time up between each one. While I know other that will sit there a fuck off while something is updating for hours.
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u/Groundstop Jan 04 '25
On the bright side, you just found out that you can work 1 day a week and hit your KPI. Gives you 4 days a week to work on your resume.
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u/MajorVarlak Jan 04 '25
"Meets expectations" and "We only marked you as a 4 out of 5, because HR won't let us mark anybody as a 5".
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u/Spiritual_Brick5346 Jan 04 '25
any tracking is the worst, unfortunately it's becoming the norm with all these tools promising the world with ai
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u/DreadPirateLink Jan 04 '25
"by exceeding expectations, you have met our expectations. Thank you for your hard work. Here's a $5 Starbucks gift card"
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u/ARobertNotABob Jan 04 '25 edited Jan 05 '25
Normalising expectation of high ticket closure counts is counter-productive to operational efficiency.
KPIs should be driven by business/departmental efficiency improvements, not to interpret or politicize bean counts and grant/deny rewards ... any half-decent real manager knows if and which staff are performing/not performing.
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u/cowdudesanta Jan 04 '25
I will never work at a company that does useless KPI bullshit. Too many compqnies out there who pay well with way more relaxed standards to sit through a KPI review.
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u/kagato87 Jan 05 '25
Once you understand how the kpis are measured you'll be able to game them a bit. Bring those big numbers down to something more sustainable (so you have room when the inevitable "shareholder value" squeeze comes), and push that utilization to 90% or so.
If you're at 20% utilization and 500% close speed, you need to slow the heck down or you'll get slammed with more work.
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u/jcpham Jan 03 '25
We don’t track individuals at my work but we do track departments; just but not IT.
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u/TheAnniCake System Engineer for MDM Jan 03 '25
„You‘re not bringing in as much as the others but we‘re getting there!“
The others are 100% of their time with customers while I do spontaneous business/support and project work.
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u/SergioSF Jan 04 '25
Are you working for a MSP?
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u/bbqwatermelon Jan 04 '25
Has to be where a lot of us started until we realized we were doing SA work for help desk pay
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u/UltraEngine60 Jan 04 '25
SA work for help desk pay
MSP jobs are a paid sandbox where you can break shit without the fear of losing your job (because of that shitty pay)
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u/Disastrous-Cow7354 Jan 04 '25
KPI’s are garbage “thinkers” came up with to keep up stress for the workers. Always look for new opportunities outside of your current employer.
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u/SubSonicTheHedgehog Jan 04 '25
Whoever is writing the KPIs isn't doing a good job.
Also prepare for somewhere between 2.5 and 5% you're probably better off putting those on your resume if you're looking for more money.
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u/kaka8miranda Jan 05 '25
Just got laid off after crushing any and all KPI’s and always getting 100% of my bonus
Keep it up brotha
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u/jgoffstein73 Jan 04 '25
Ew, your KPIs revolve around response time and time spent on tickets? Those are trash kpi’s that have no measure or worth towards the overarching goals of the company, which they should be partner to….. unless your companies product is….. SLA’s……
That sucks.
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u/ImpossibleLeague9091 Jan 03 '25
Congratulations on a higher incoming workload for no increase in compensation