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That’s a great story. Here’s an email I got back in 2012 about a team declining to participate in KPIs, turning down money. As far as I know, no one “lost their jobs."
Thanks very much for your message.
I did not blog about this, because my blog is still under construction.
We are a software company employing about 50 people.
A few years ago, our CEO introduced a company wide bonus system, based on 5 KPI’s. The KPI’s were different for every department, to be determined by the manager of the departments, like Direct Sales, Helpdesk, Development.
I told the CEO that, as a Scrum Master (and manager of the Development department), I could not decide on these KPI’s myself (nor did I want to), so I “took it to the team”, to coin a popular (and rightly so!) Agile phrase.
We discussed it in multiple sessions (I did not “lead” these sessions, nor did I put my view across, I just asked questions), but the team kept coming to the same conclusion: Any KPI we could come up with, either infringed on the Scrum principles, or deferred the team from the continuous improvement principle.
And believe me, we brainstormed about a lot of possibilities: Number of story points gotten credit for per sprint, number of iterations per story or task, newly reported bugs per sprint, even lines (and characters) of code.
Our bottom line was, that it just doesn’t sound right, quantifying performance on any other criteria than working software. And, adult and intelligent as we obviously are (I mean, we’re Development, right?), there will still always be this “hidden agenda” in the back of one’s mind, that makes one, for example, report two defects in one bug, or write a routine differently, to make it larger, in order to positively influence the KPI’s. It’s all unwanted distractions, in the end.
So ultimately, we unanimously decided to kindly refuse the offer. Much to the surprise of the rest of the company, including management. Priceless to see the look on their faces. Funnily enough, no-one asked us to explain why. I reported it to the CEO, and he understood. He’s into Agile. Thank God.
Up to this day, we still don’t participate in the bonus system.
I’ve used this example on a few occasions myself, because it’s very illustrative.
You’re absolutely welcome to share it with other people, if it contributes to spreading the word.
Kind regards
[name omitted pending permission to identify]
> On May 22, 2015, at 4:00 AM, Stephen Starkey [email protected] [SCRUMDEVELOPMENT] <[email protected]> wrote:
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> What an interesting thread! For individual performance improvement we use this approach that I wrote about last year at my company and it is very well-received (the feedback people receive from their peers is generally accepted and with gratitude):
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> http://bit.ly/cl-feedforward <http://bit.ly/cl-feedforward>
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> Also, when I first started I was the manager (now I'm the agile coach), and I took the radical step of simply refusing to participate. We have a bonus plan that is based on company performance -- each department receives enough cash to pay out a percentage of everyone's salary and the head of that department can allocate it how they want. So I said pay everyone at 100% of their allocation.
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> There was a brief hot moment, but I shared with them how hard it is to pin down individual performance and what it does to team cohesion and they backed down. It also helped to build up a relationship with executives and a lot of transparency so they could see how much better the environment was than before I worked there, so they trusted my judgment.
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> I have in the past used these articles:
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> http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00275?gko=c442b <http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00275?gko=c442b>
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> http://gojko.net/2008/08/07/paying-programmers-are-bonuses-bad-and-what-to-do-about-it <http://gojko.net/2008/08/07/paying-programmers-are-bonuses-bad-and-what-to-do-about-it>
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> Hope this helps!
>
> Stephen Starkey
> empathy | connectedness | restorative | relator | belief
> http://coreagile.co/coaching <http://coreagile.co/coaching>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
>