IT service management has become more challenging, requiring high-end tools and skills to implement advanced capabilities and future-ready practices for external as well as internal IT services.
I&O (Infrastructure & Operations) organizations are finding, developing and reporting metrics tough and perplexing in current cloud-based
ITIL® service management architecture. These I&O organizations are engaging in wrong practices concerning designing and implementing metrics, which we have outlined below:
- Over-usage of tools
Just because there are so many ITSM tools offering metrics and reporting, it does not mean that the firms go for quality rather than quantity. The implementation needs to be centered on desired performance and result.
- Not sure about implementation
I&O organizations are creating metrics, because they have tools, but they do not understand and ponder over why they need to analyze that specific data and create metrics, and whether it gives them desirable results against the targets.
- Going one-dimensional
With no proper assessment of their monthly, quarterly or yearly trends, I&O organizations are not hitting the right performance measurement and taking only one-dimensional view of the metrics, which can lead to degraded performance over time.
- Comparing performance with competitors based only on I&O benchmarks
Comparing performance is good to assess and analyze the organization’s improvement and areas to focus upon. But what I&O organizations is to put emphasis on only metrics, without assessing the included profiles, as different firms have different offerings and services.
- Not understanding the relation between metrics and performance
Firms misunderstood that reduction in incident volumes is a great improvement, but the reality can be different, as the reduction might have been caused by poor service handling. Thus, organizations need to put incident volume metrics with customer satisfaction statistics in parallel, to clearly gauge the effectiveness of the service.
- Viewing metrics as output
This is a big mistake firms do, as they see metrics as the final output, without understanding that these metrics acts as input to other service aspects. These metrics should be seen as a scale to improve the activity.
- Poor metrics reporting delivery
Organizations need to focus on metric reporting in equal measures as collecting metric data, to improve the overall objective. They need to make sure that the metrics are delivered and used up in a desirable manner.
- Not understanding the behavioral aspects of metrics
Focusing on one metrics in isolation, for personal target achievement can lead to disruptive end-results, which is dangerous for overall operations and IT service delivery.
- Measuring easy stuff rather than evaluating importance
I&O organizations make a basic mistake, focusing on collecting and reporting metrics which are easy, rather than assessing the value they give, which incidentally degrades valuable performance results.
- No context or relation between metrics
Lack of correlation between different metrics is also one aspect hampering the overall service performance. For example, considering the reduction in cost-per-incident as a success, rather than evaluating why the costs have reduced.
So, professionals need to imbibe efficient and business result-oriented practices when undergoing
ITIL® foundation training, to fully utilize, design and implement best IT service management metrics.
Note:
1. ITIL® is a registered trade mark of AXELOS Limited.
2. Swirl logo™ is a registered trademark of AXELOS Limited