[Sociable]

Targets have a valid place in any organisation.

The problem comes when the target becomes more important than the reason it was put in place.

Perfect example of this was our local Hospital that was so worried about achieving the "target" for reducing waiting times they found a way to reach the target without actually reducing waiting times one iota. (Effectively manipulating the data to give a more favourable result)

Had they concentrated on reducing the waiting time instead, the target would have served a very useful purpose.

It's basically another form of my pet hate whereby a "system" becomes more important than the job it was designed to do.

The idiot that says, "Oh we can't do that because of the System", as if the system was God. If doing it against the system actually allows the original purpose of the sytem to be fulfilled then the system gets bypassed if there is any sanity involved.

Sadly this is rarely the case, especially in large organisations like NTL, most Banks and also pretty well all Government departments.