Vincent Bernat
Building a Soviet Nail Factory: how KPIs killed efficiency. A story that I often tell. It is now old enough to not upset my former colleagues. https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2026-kpi-goodhart
Building a Soviet Nail Factory: how KPIs killed efficiency

How an obsession with KPIs at Orange led people to game them, slowing service delivery to a crawl. A cautionary tale about Goodhart's law.

Jun 16 at 8:19amWeb
Show threadDj PorCus - WillJun 16
@vbernat Good read ! It reminds me someone mentioning me the ' managing class society ' (coucou Sofus) where expertise and common sense doesn't matter, as long as the expected (measured) numbers are there . The shift from companies ran by geeks to companies ran by MBAs/Marketing experts is sometimes scary. I however still have some respect for a person who has degrees/understanding in both field, they might see things with a wider eye, which is very welcome nowadays.
Show threadMarcos DioneJun 16

@vbernat

> they asked to do the same for the next year

WTF

"OK, gimme double the people".

Seems like we were colleagues for a while, but I was in Sophia (2011-12). I don't remember much of KPIs at the time, but my French back then was terrible (I learned it while on the job, no the best experience :)

Show threadVincent BernatJun 16
@mdione by the time, we were pretty deep into the new system. I suppose that if you discover it once it is running, you don't notice the inefficiencies that much.
Show threadWolf480plJun 17

@vbernat
> Orange wanted to know if this team was performing well, so they asked for KPIs

they're gonna use time from ticket submission to a deployed server, right?

...r-right?

> They decided to use the number of tickets completed in a year