Service Reporting

[cheekyb]

Hi experts,
I have some questions for you:

What are the key aspects to report upon on departmental sevice reporting ( on a monthly basis)

For the board and senior management how should the standard monthly dept report differ for them

How do you measure and report on end to end service

I am so so stuck on all of this - so your assistance advice etc would be greatly appreciated

thanks
cheekyb

[gspaff]

First off, can you ask them what they need to help their oversight efforts? It is very legitimate to ask senior management what they need as the metrics used drive behavior. My strongest recommendation is to seek out at least some base key process indicators from them. You can add some from there depending on what your organization needs.

Think about metrics in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, economy and equality. For different processes in different stages of maturity you will want to use different metrics. One book you ought to order right away is "Metrics for IT Service Management" from the itSMF (ISBN 90-77212-69-8).

With the above said, what processes do you need to report on? The service desk? All of IT? The PMO? Development? What are your goals for each?

--George

[cheekyb]

Thanks George

The reports should be on service , availability and ideally show the true business impact of an outage.

At the moment their monthly reports are 45 pages which is monsterous - so we want to get it done to about 10. True business impact - however is a hot potato for them - as they dont currently report that info anywhere

[gspaff]

As to the 10 page part - you really need to focus your efforts on the KPIs and presentation format they need. In my experience, once you get past two pages, senior management just doesn't read the report. At best, they may skim it trying to discern if there is anything they need to know. Consider using a dashboard on an Intranet that gives them the high-level summary and they can then drill down into the underlying data if they want to. Please forgive my preaching, but you must focus on giving them what they need vs, generating metrics just because you can. I see tons of reports that are monstrous that are counterproductive because they sit in a pile on a desk to be read "some day" and then are never looked at.

When you say "service", what do you mean? Quality of service? Contribution to the business?

For availability, think about the costs to the business. % availability is easy to score but you really need to think about the costs of downtime, which I think you are alluding to with your business impact comment. Can you take each one of the business areas you service and work with each area, or perhaps accounting, to establish the costs of a system outage in terms of accounting costs, economic (opportunity costs like lost sales) and impacts to other things such as customer service and brand value in the market, etc.?

My approach would be to understand from senior management as much as I could in terms of what they want (and maybe you're at that point), then work out the measures to use with a core team of stakeholders. Next, I'd confirm the proposed metrics (and maybe not all are numerical indicators - it's sometimes beneficial to have some soft subjective scores depending on the topic at hand) with the business areas involved and then present what your plan is to senior management. They can then ask questions, make recommendations, or even outright approve your plan. From there you can move forward with your reporting.