New policy for assigning old loans to teams

[Guest]

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[Ali]

Hi there,

I wanted to reach out to share a new policy that we've designed about assigning old loans to lending teams. The Customer Service team has had the ability to assign or re-assign loans to lending teams. We designed this capability to fix true mistakes made by lenders - if someone meant to assign a loan to one team but accidentally assigned it to another at checkout, or if someone forgot to assign a loan to a team completely, we could fix that for them. Recently, we've been getting requests from several Kiva lenders asking us to assign all of their unassigned loans to a particular lending team. While this wasn't what the tool was designed for, our team was glad to help these lenders out and re-assign their loans.

When doing this, we were alerted (thank you!) that team loan counts were changing, and it turns out that some members of the CS team were accidentally re-assigning loans from one team to another, rather than just assigning unassigned loans. This raised some issues with our team goal and team statistics data falling out of sync, and it also spurred a discussion about our policy for assigning old loans to lending teams. After much discussion, we decided to improve our policy for assigning old loans to teams.

From now on, we will assign or re-assign loans to teams if we receive the request within 5 days after the loan has been made. This will allow us to assign and re-assign loans when a lender has truly made a mistake, but we won't be able to assign or re-assign loans that were made more than 5 days in the past.

If you have any questions about this policy or about why we made this decision, please let me know. I'll be glad to answer them!

Thanks,
Ali

[YowieFreak]

... and it turns out that some members of the CS team were accidentally re-assigning loans from one team to another, rather than just assigning unassigned loans. ...

Will these incorrect reassignments be corrected?

[David2051]

I hope it will be possible to compare loan/team assignments to backup data from before the recent changes were requested and correct all team assignments that were changed more than 5 days after the loan was made.  It seems very unfair to all Kiva teams to change assignments after the fact.

[YowieFreak]

Ali / Cailin,

If the system is being changed on August 23 to prevent Customer Service staff from correcting the mistakes they made recently, can you please confirm that those mistakes will be corrected before August 23.

Or, if the mistakes aren't going to be fixed before then, can you please confirm that the system changes won't actually be implemented until some later date.

Regards,
  Ian

[David2051]

Yes, I too am very concerned that loan assignments be corrected.  At least one of my teams has lost a number of loans and no one seems to know how many loans were lost.  Other teams have evidently risen in the team standings even though no corresponding new lending occurred in this time frame.

I would like to hear that Kiva will query the appropriate backup data to determine which loans went astray and put them back.

This whole episode makes a complete mockery of all teams and team competition.  While I'm no fan of team competition I value data integrity highly and it has been severely compromised in this case and needs to be corrected.   That can only happen through Kiva doing an appropriate investigation to determine which loans need to be returned to which teams. 

[Ali]

Hi David and Ian,

Thanks for sharing your concern about this. We've been discussing this issue at length at Kiva, and I wanted to give you a detailed update on where things stand now.

Immediately after we realized what was going on, we stopped the reassignment of loans to teams. We also worked to assess our policies so that we could identify how this happened in the first place. Based on our analysis, we've been able to figure out how this happened and have now changed our policy and put procedures in place to regulate the reassignment of loans. As a result, this shouldn't happen again.

I do want to clarify that there are extensive controls around Kiva's financial information itself (i.e. the loans and repayments). Team assignments are not considered a central part of this financial information though, so our controls around team assignments has not been as tight as our controls around our core financial data. That said, we've worked to tighten the controls around our team assignment data.

The number of loans that were mistakenly reassigned should be fairly limited to the few people who requested their unassigned loans to be reassigned. We've worked hard as a team to identify a possible path that would allow us to figure out which loans were mistakenly assigned. We've been able to find one imperfect solution, but unfortunately, that solution would require a huge amount of work and involve lots of engineering time. Given our limited resources, we just don't have the bandwidth to make this happen at this time.

In the future, we hope that our new policies and procedures will prevent this from happening. We are also growing our team so that in the future we'll have more team members who can invest their time in these sorts of efforts. I know a few teams were especially affected, so if you're open to it I could put you in touch with our social media team so they can help you set up a member drive. I hope in some small way this begins to address the lost team assignments for your lending teams.

Best,
Ali

[YowieFreak]

Hi David and Ian,

Thanks for sharing your concern about this. We've been discussing this issue at length at Kiva, and I wanted to give you a detailed update on where things stand now.

Immediately after we realized what was going on, we stopped the reassignment of loans to teams. We also worked to assess our policies so that we could identify how this happened in the first place. Based on our analysis, we've been able to figure out how this happened and have now changed our policy and put procedures in place to regulate the reassignment of loans. As a result, this shouldn't happen again.

I think Cailin was right in highlighting the confusion re discussing in two different threads the issue of team loan counts being incorrect on the Summary page.

I have absolutely no concern over the new policy (other than the fact that the associated system change will probably make it very hard to correct the technical issues that are affecting the loan counts).

My only concern is that the Summary page is displaying the incorrect numbers - a purely technical matter caused by "garbage" within the database.

I do want to clarify that there are extensive controls around Kiva's financial information itself (i.e. the loans and repayments). Team assignments are not considered a central part of this financial information though, so our controls around team assignments has not been as tight as our controls around our core financial data. That said, we've worked to tighten the controls around our team assignment data.

The number of loans that were mistakenly reassigned should be fairly limited to the few people who requested their unassigned loans to be reassigned. We've worked hard as a team to identify a possible path that would allow us to figure out which loans were mistakenly assigned. We've been able to find one imperfect solution, but unfortunately, that solution would require a huge amount of work and involve lots of engineering time. Given our limited resources, we just don't have the bandwidth to make this happen at this time.

I guess the system change that was just introduced is what has now made your job a lot harder - perhaps the Technical team and the Customer Service team need to liaise a bit better around the timing of releases?

In the future, we hope that our new policies and procedures will prevent this from happening. We are also growing our team so that in the future we'll have more team members who can invest their time in these sorts of efforts. I know a few teams were especially affected, so if you're open to it I could put you in touch with our social media team so they can help you set up a member drive. I hope in some small way this begins to address the lost team assignments for your lending teams.

I doubt if I would be of much use in the holding of a member drive to increase your staff levels.  (And, as you say, that seems to now be the only way to address the lost team assignments.)  I think such a member drive would be much better driven by someone within the HR department of Kiva itself.

[David2051]

The number of loans that were mistakenly reassigned should be fairly limited to the few people who requested their unassigned loans to be reassigned. We've worked hard as a team to identify a possible path that would allow us to figure out which loans were mistakenly assigned. We've been able to find one imperfect solution, but unfortunately, that solution would require a huge amount of work and involve lots of engineering time. Given our limited resources, we just don't have the bandwidth to make this happen at this time.

As a programmer myself, I can't understand why comparing the team assignments from an appropriate backup file to the current assignments would take "a huge amount of work".  It would take someone on the programming side to put together a little bit of sql.  All that is really needed is a report of the discrepancies so that CS can correct the problems that they caused.

I applaud the changes that have been put in place to prevent such problems in the future, but that does not fix the data now in the database.  

It seems to me that Kiva has been saying that teams, teams standings and team competition is such a great thing.  How much engineering effort went into programming team leader boards?  Links for team recruitment, etc?  And now the integrity of team data is of so little importance that it's not worth the small effort it would take to compare current data to a backup file?  I just don't get it.

Edit:  I forgot about all the programming effort that went into the team goals pages!  That had to be a huge effort.  And now the data displayed on those goals has been compromised and that's ok?  Kiva just doesn't care about the loan counts?