Hardcoded KPIs
Yup, I've experienced these as well... My favourite from a previous employer was a 'very important' dashboard of service management stats for an exec team. If a measure fell below it's pre-ordained acceptable level teams would be rewarded with great scrutiny, micro-management and potential loss of bonus; Bad Things (TM). One of the measures was "customer satisfaction",and it had been difficult to get agreement of the definition of this subjective measure, people's pay and happiness were at stake, so that metric just had a default value and no calculations. And thus it stayed for many months. Everyone was happy...