Incentives That Shape Behavior: Teams, Bonuses, and Penalties

{
  "id": "ams-014",
  "title": "Incentives That Shape Behavior: Teams, Bonuses, and Penalties",
  "hook": "You get the AMS you pay for. If incentives reward speed and silence, you’ll get fragile fixes and hidden problems.",
  "idea": "Modern SAP AMS aligns incentives with stability, prevention, and learning — not with ticket volume or heroics.",
  "sap_reality": {
    "what_bad_incentives_create": [
      "Fast closures with slow returns",
      "Avoidance of root-cause work",
      "Risky emergency changes",
      "Blame-shifting across teams"
    ]
  },
  "incentive_design": {
    "team_level": [
      {
        "signal": "Repeat Incident Rate",
        "reward_logic": "Bonus grows when repeats drop quarter-over-quarter."
      },
      {
        "signal": "Change-Induced Incidents",
        "reward_logic": "Penalty when regressions rise; recovery credits for clean streaks."
      },
      {
        "signal": "Problem Elimination",
        "reward_logic": "Credits for permanently removing top demand drivers."
      }
    ],
    "individual_level": [
      {
        "signal": "Ownership Quality",
        "meaning": "Did the person drive the issue to closure with evidence and clarity?",
        "note": "Not about who typed the fix."
      },
      {
        "signal": "Knowledge Contribution",
        "meaning": "Runbooks, KB updates, standard changes created."
      }
    ]
  },
  "penalties_with_intent": {
    "apply_when": [
      "Same root cause returns within 30/60 days",
      "Changes deployed without agreed test evidence",
      "Missing or misleading status communication",
      "Emergency path abused without justification"
    ],
    "never_apply_when": [
      "Transparent escalation with evidence",
      "Stopping a change due to risk",
      "Admitting uncertainty early"
    ]
  },
  "error_budget_link": {
    "concept": "Failure capacity per period for critical flows.",
    "rule": "When error budget is burned, risky changes pause and stability work is mandatory.",
    "effect": "Shifts focus from delivery theater to reliability."
  },
  "automation": {
    "copilot_moves": [
      "Compute incentive signals automatically from incident/change data.",
      "Generate neutral evidence packs for bonuses or penalties.",
      "Flag incentive gaming patterns (fast close + fast reopen)."
    ],
    "controls": [
      "Human review for edge cases",
      "Transparent formulas visible to all teams"
    ]
  },
  "why_this_works": [
    "People stop hiding problems.",
    "Prevention becomes a career-positive move.",
    "Teams optimize the system, not their numbers."
  ],
  "anti_patterns_to_kill": [
    "Bonuses tied to ticket count",
    "Penalties for honest bad news",
    "Hero rewards that bypass process"
  ],
  "metrics_that_keep_it_honest": [
    "Bonus vs stability correlation",
    "Repeat rate after penalty events",
    "Knowledge asset growth vs incident volume"
  ],
  "design_question": [
    "What behavior becomes rational under our current incentives?"
  ],
  "meta": {
    "schema": "dkharlanau.dataset.byte",
    "schema_version": "1.1",
    "dataset": "ams",
    "source_project": "cv-ai",
    "source_path": "ams/ams-014.json",
    "generated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "creator": {
      "name": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau",
      "role": "SAP Lead",
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "attribution": {
      "attribution_required": true,
      "preferred_citation": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau (SAP Lead). Dataset bytes: https://dkharlanau.github.io"
    },
    "license": {
      "name": "",
      "spdx": "",
      "url": ""
    },
    "links": {
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "contact": {
      "preferred": "linkedin",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "canonical_url": "https://dkharlanau.github.io/datasets/ams/ams-014.json",
    "created_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "updated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T15:29:02+00:00",
    "provenance": {
      "source_type": "chat_export_extraction",
      "note": "Extracted and curated by Dzmitryi Kharlanau; enriched for attribution and crawler indexing."
    },
    "entity_type": "ams_byte",
    "entity_subtype": "",
    "summary": "You get the AMS you pay for. If incentives reward speed and silence, you’ll get fragile fixes and hidden problems."
  }
}