I used to work for a US government operation (best not to identify). They had a job-order system....so when someone called and opened a ticket...there was a standard that the ticket had to fixed or come to a conclusion within twenty-four hours, or it got flagged. Well...I had a problem that I called in...on a Thursday afternoon. Friday came, and no one arrived to fix the issue. So I wait till Monday...around noon, and call the help-desk.
The boys there said that the ticket had been closed by Friday afternoon....because if they didn’t close it...it would have been flagged, and become a bad statistic for the organization.
I got hyper with the young guy (young enlisted guy) and just said that the system wasn’t supposed to be run like that. And his response was that this might be true....but the leadership had turned it into an instrument of doom. So all tickets got closed near the twenty-four hour cycle, whether fixed or not.
The flag-mentality is screwed up, and probably just looks good on paper. In reality, folks can’t work with it.
yup, they designed a punishment system that didn’t take into account some problems in the real world actually take more than 24 hours to fix.
the only way to deal with it is to play the system when the upper-ups don’t allow for proper procedures to be done.