We had the monthly ITSMF Atlanta Local Interest Group (LIG) meeting today and had a terrific guest speaker Mr. Don Page of the Marval Group. Don is known as the “God Father of ITIL” and has authored or co-authored many of the best practices and standards in place today for IT Service Management (ITSM). Don’s presentation today focused on how important the right metrics are in the continuous improvement processes companies undertake via the adoption of ITSM best practices such as ITIL, CoBiT, MOF, etc. Don is a hard core practitioner of ITSM and certainly not just a talking head!
As a way of framing how most IT shops do things today in terms of metrics reporting on simple infrastructure components, he shared a story from a previous client engagement. He walked into the office of the IT manager and saw the walls covered with all sorts of IT related charts and reports on availability, capacity, performance, etc. Seeing this type of “feel good” or “feel important” environment before, he simply asked the client, “What decision did this report/chart/graph help you make?” As the client couldn’t answer for each chart, Don went about ripping the reports off the wall and throwing them into the circular file.
The point is, most IT shops are creating reports and tracking metrics that are a complete waste of time and add no value to the business.
Don outlined the following as examples of metrics and reports aligned with the business needed by IT management:
- Business aligned reporting demonstrating value for money & success
- Conformance of agreed business service levels & targets
- Customer perception/satisfaction
- Organizational & process bottle-necks
- Workload patterning & trends
- Staff resource usage & workloads
- Business areas for improvement
The metrics and reports used should cause an emotional reaction (good or bad) by those who review them. Don offered these as starting points for finding emotional metrics within your organization:
Identify what generates management emotion:
- Brand credibility
- Customer loyalty reinforcement
- Revenue loss reduction
- Business improvement/savings
- Personal/organizational credibility
- How you can make management & yourself look good
Then Align to the Business:
- Use business language & terms
- Classify using business SERVICES
- Report and present information which the ‘Board’ will relate to
Quality Metrics Generate Positive Reaction:
- Demonstrates value for money
- Contributes to staff & customer development
- Promotes continued investment in IT
- Reduces outsourcing possibility
- Drives Professionalism
- Promotes team building & communication
- Maintains business
Report evaluation criteria? The 8 steps to making your life easier:
- What does the report tell me?
- Do I ‘understand’ what the statistics are saying?
- Are the results a surprise?
- Do they highlight areas for improvement
- Do they highlight our areas of success
- What do they tell the person who needs them
- What action/decision will they invoke?
- What other complementary metrics may I need
Miscellaneous notes:
- “emotional metrics enforce customer perception”
- “customer perception is reality”
- Avoid reporting on component level metrics and rather on end-to-end service metrics
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These are good ideas, especially the notion that metrics should be emotional so they trigger a reaction.