I think this is a rubbish excuse made by people who don't understand the role of such a "blue team". If the organization initially adopts metrics that are counter-productive (e.g. measuring feature completion and not technical debt), it is the role of the blue team to change the metrics such that the neglected areas are properly accounted for in final performance metrics. No metrics should be final; only iteratively tuned to achieve results that are more and more indicative of the underlying performance.
It is difficult, but still possible, to measure technical debt and other "hard" metrics. It is precisely the job of the blue team to deal with that.
Just because you've made a team and given them the job of doing something (incredibly) difficult, doesn't mean you've actually solved that problem or even should expect them to solve it most of the time.
You're absolutely right that having a "blue team" is much better than not having one - but it doesn't mean that calling out the reality that many organizational activities can't be easily measured is a "rubbish excuse made by people who don't understand".
And how do you measure the person who takes time out of their day to help a colleague in another department, who is having a tough time understanding an issue, so the person takes 15 minutes out to help them, boosting morale and overall company cohesion?
Or should they be penalised for wasting 15 minutes?
First of all, not every company wishes to incentivize this behavior. Peopleware reminds us that phone calls and other real-time interruptions are big drags on productivity for knowledge workers who need to concentrate. Every time somebody has a verbal conversation to illuminate something unclear, is a time that it wasn't recorded into some kind of documentation that will help future people with the same confusion.
But say you do wish to incentivize that. You can, if you can track the medium of exchange. Take everyone's phone records, reward short conversations, but disincentivize conversations that are too short ("sorry, not now, bye") or too long (social chatting in place of productivity). If you can cost-effectively put it through some kind of ML classifier that could tell you if the conversations were helpful internal support, personal, etc., then all the better. Translate that into some kind of score and factor it into whatever formula that produces personal KPIs.
Not saying it's easy. Just saying it's possible, and it's realistic if you have a team whose full-time job is to come up with these kinds of solutions.
Do you seriously want to incentivize productive behavior during people's work breaks? Because that doesn't sound to me like something you want to incentivize (risk of burnout etc.).
No, I'm taking a quick break from my "work" to help a valued colleague solve a problem informally in a way that actually adds more value to the organisation than if I had been sat at my desk. I enjoy the human interaction, its good for my sense of wellbeing. My colleague has his stress levels reduced. We learn a bit about each other's jobs in those 15 minutes and a product is delivered a week earlier than it would otherwise have been.
On the other hand if this is a priority and incentivized, what’s to stop it from going too far, where employees would get extra credit for chatting for entertainment
Depends, do you want that to happen or not? You seem to be making an assumption this is good, but in some organizations this would be a bad thing to penalize. I'm not sure why you would do this in engineering, but it is important to acknowledge that this isn't a universal good and so maybe your company wants to discourage it for some reason.
Assuming you want people to help each other, you need to capture metrics on it. A few years back I had a metric of helping n people in a different department: I kept track of those interactions so I had something to report at the end of the year.
Was that your personal metrics? Metrics created for yourself are subject to less gaming because when you start lying to yourself about those, you will start to wonder why keep those metrics at all.
If that was a company-issued, top-down metric, I hope it wasn't defined literally as "helping n people in a different department", because that has enough wiggle room to sail an aircraft carrier through. The difficulty of creating a good metric here comes from the difficulty of defining what exactly does it mean, in company context, to "help other people" - and also what it explicitly doesn't mean.
I had to report it to my boss. It was top down, but only a few interactions were required, and it wasn't reported farther up the chain. Because I had to report to my boss, he knew me well enough to judge if it was enough. It was just enough of a metric to ensure people looked for something to bridge a communication gap, without being hard enough that people tried to game it much.
There is a philosophical debate underlying this. Take the analogy of a ML algorithm:
We know many algos are DESIGNED to be a black box, to be unexplainable. Red team iterates an incredibly effective algorithm that produces the desired outputs (with unseen risk built up as well). Blue team, in order to manage risk, is tasked with .. explaining the unexplainable process? An impossible task.
Is it possible that human/organizational processes can be also unexplainable?
In practice, you wouldn't really need to have a metric for the blue team, for the same reason you don't need metrics in a 5-person startup. Management is close to the blue team to replace being "close" to thousands of people, and because management is close to the blue team, can judge their output without needing a formal metric.
Maybe if you had an organization that was big enough to require several blue teams (a military or government?), then you'd need a metric for blue teams. Such a metric would probably compare the sub-KPIs of each sub-organization that each blue team was responsible for, including metrics on customer satisfaction, and warrant investigation if the metrics went under.
The blue teams can't really game that metric without the entire organization falling over, and if that happened, the executives would be to blame, not the blue team.
I know a girl who works for United Airlines' "blue team." It's a small (5-8 people?) inward-facing operations consulting group that reports directly to Oscar, the CEO.
It's composed of engineers and they analyze existing processes and create new metrics all day long.
They do worry about their own careers/promotions etc but the group is too small for there really to be any opportunities to "game" anything beyond basic politics.
I trust it's just habitual, but I think it's important to describe her as a woman and not a girl. When a company is casually described as being made up of men and girls, it sends an insidious message to everyone about who's taken more seriously.
The role of metrics is to grant visibility. Any policies governing outcomes, e.g. pay bonuses for high metrics, those policies are set and iteratively improved by people working off intuition.
Doesn't mean the metrics are bullshit, just means they're a tool.
The problem though is that executives need some set of a few hundred numbers they can use to track the state of a company. For just my job alone I could generate more metrics then that to properly characterize our state and problem space -- but then an exec would need to deal with thousands and thousands of numbers.
Sorta sucks, but that's how it goes. Good execs manage a sufficiently decentralized system, but they still need SOME set of summary numbers.
It is difficult, but still possible, to measure technical debt and other "hard" metrics. It is precisely the job of the blue team to deal with that.