You need to learn to game it. People care about this stuff are usually stupid. When I led a large support organization I had an SVP who really cared about open incident duration.
His pattern for giving a fuck was predictable. My strategy was to hold certain tickets in an undead state (not impacting the metric), then reopen them and close them, demonstrating a metric improvement.
He got his improvement and big shot street cred, users weren’t impacted, and I didn’t have to ruin support to try to grind out small gains.
It's less stupidity and more "if we don't prove that we meet x control in y compliance framework, our auditors will deem us non-compliant and we will be fined into oblivion"
His pattern for giving a fuck was predictable. My strategy was to hold certain tickets in an undead state (not impacting the metric), then reopen them and close them, demonstrating a metric improvement.
He got his improvement and big shot street cred, users weren’t impacted, and I didn’t have to ruin support to try to grind out small gains.