That Little Known KPI Every Ops Team Should Track

Being an ops is tough. You handle lots of incidents, and have on-call where you might get awaken 3 or 4 times a night during the week. The same happens during the day, when you get interrupted during your work to manage yet another incident with a surplus of stress.

For that reason, there's a KPI I started to track one year ago: the team members exhaustion rate. Tracking this KPI is critical when you want to avoid your ops to burn out or have them making mistakes because they are too tired to think anymore.

To track my team members exhaustion rate, I assign exhaustion points to every hour handling an incident:

• During work day: 1 point
• During the day, Saturday and Sunday: 3 points.
• During the night: 5 points, +2 points per hour after the third incident.

You don't need to be on-call to take over an incident, but it adds more stress, so the tracking applies to every team member.

Then, I track the number of points each member gained during during the last week and last month.

• More than 30 points 2 weeks in a row raises a warning: that person might need a day off to recover.
• More than 100 points in a month: that person sure needs a day off.
• More than 300 points in 3 months: the team is under sized and we need more people (and obviously less incidents).

Such KPIs are indeed subjective, and you might want to change the point distribution, but keep in mind how important following your team well being is critical and must be tracked with actionable metrics.

Photo: Crossfit Exhaustion, Tom Woodward.