I knew there would be something like this, a modern IT system would have to work like this, and to do job performance evaluation. It also creates a paper trail, of who has worked on a file, and who knows it is going on so long.
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.
I didn't understand this before going to the whole article where he explained that elapsed time on a case is the primary metric for evaluating job performance right through the whole management chain.
The other thing I’d point out that is very odd about this is that IRS has been prohibited – by that same RRA98 – from using enforcement statistics to measure employee performance. Nobody’s allowed to rate you on how many cases you made, how many arrests, convictions, seizures, levies, taxes assessed, etc. Managers get in big trouble for that, but they still have to evaluate employee performance somehow, so the Service devised this whole scheme that revolves around time.
Elapsed time on a case is a huge issue. Agents get dinged if they’ve got too many hours or if a case drags on for too long. It’s all tracked in the computerized case management system, and managers get in trouble with their managers if their “inventory” (and yes, that is the term that is used to describe your case load) has overage cases. I can’t stress enough how important this is to the Service, and every employee knows it. Your performance report is going to be affected by overage cases, too many hours on a case, etc., but more importantly, the manager’s performance report is going to be affected, and her manager’s, and so on.