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Clearance Rates
Nov. 12th, 2007 01:18 pmOnce a month I do a check-up on my subscription orders for my publications. Where the admin office in Colchester has the details wrong, then I e-mail them and they change it.
Well, that's the theory. In fact, every month I was e-mailing them a missive only fractionally shorter than Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. The net result of this was that everyone at Colchester treated the e-mail like a hot potato unsolvable mass murder case that would play hell with their "customer-facing queries solved" targets (where "other part of company" = "customer". Net result, nothing got done.
So, I got cunning. Now I send an e-mail for eachin individual order that is wrong. Nice, concise, easily fixable, and a good way to click up the clearance rate for Colchester.
So, I didn't need telling by the police force that the clearance rate targets are stupid ... causing police to focus on the simpler crimes and allocating resources away from other matters, encouraging citizens not to report crimes deemed to be hard to solve, and so on. I have experience of it at first hand.
The problem is, this month, I added up 32 separate e-mails that I would have to send to get the subs list right.
Hell, there's no way I'll manage all that.
So, now my clearance rate is suffering. Of course, no-one checks up on my clearance rates, so that doesn't matter. For me, I do it because it needs doing.
The whole concept of "targets" for an employment sector where people are intrinsically trying "to do good" (hospitals, policing) is moronic. If they aren't doing the job, then get rid of them. Ahh, but then you have tribunals, and tribunals like numbers to back up cases. So how can you sack someone unless you have targets that they fail to meet?
As it is, I'll probably send nine or ten of those e-mails before I get tired of it. A bit of progress in this Sysyphian task of maintaining an accurate subs base (actually, more of a Forth-Bridge-painting task, but I digress) will have been achieved. But I know one thing for sure. "Targets", the setting or not thereof, won't have made a blind bit of difference.
Well, that's the theory. In fact, every month I was e-mailing them a missive only fractionally shorter than Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. The net result of this was that everyone at Colchester treated the e-mail like a hot potato unsolvable mass murder case that would play hell with their "customer-facing queries solved" targets (where "other part of company" = "customer". Net result, nothing got done.
So, I got cunning. Now I send an e-mail for eachin individual order that is wrong. Nice, concise, easily fixable, and a good way to click up the clearance rate for Colchester.
So, I didn't need telling by the police force that the clearance rate targets are stupid ... causing police to focus on the simpler crimes and allocating resources away from other matters, encouraging citizens not to report crimes deemed to be hard to solve, and so on. I have experience of it at first hand.
The problem is, this month, I added up 32 separate e-mails that I would have to send to get the subs list right.
Hell, there's no way I'll manage all that.
So, now my clearance rate is suffering. Of course, no-one checks up on my clearance rates, so that doesn't matter. For me, I do it because it needs doing.
The whole concept of "targets" for an employment sector where people are intrinsically trying "to do good" (hospitals, policing) is moronic. If they aren't doing the job, then get rid of them. Ahh, but then you have tribunals, and tribunals like numbers to back up cases. So how can you sack someone unless you have targets that they fail to meet?
As it is, I'll probably send nine or ten of those e-mails before I get tired of it. A bit of progress in this Sysyphian task of maintaining an accurate subs base (actually, more of a Forth-Bridge-painting task, but I digress) will have been achieved. But I know one thing for sure. "Targets", the setting or not thereof, won't have made a blind bit of difference.
