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measure today’s performance.
Measuring IT accomplished two things:
1) It provides a baseline of performance so a
determination canbemade if the level of performance
is acceptable.
2) Metrics also reveal, once quantified, a dollar figure
of the impacted area as the cost to the business if the
problem had not been fixed.
Showing a spotlight on a troubled area will ensure
improvement, because by the very nature of focusing
on it, you will improve it.
There was a famous study by Western Electric at
one of its plants where the company wanted to
determine what impact
light level on the factory
floor had on productivity.
The company had a
control
group,
where
lighting was unchanged
and another group when
lighting was manipulated.
Lighting was increased
and productivity went up,
but it also went up for the
control group. Lighting
was turned down and
productivity went up even
more! It wasn’t until the
lighting was turned down
to point of moonlight that productivity declined. The
conclusion was by bring attention to something and
measuring it, it improves.
Step 5: What IT Area to Start With?
That will be determined by the short term objectives
but implementing a Service Desk and Incident
Management is one of the best ways to get started.
There are reasons for doing so.
Normally creating a Service Desk and implementing
Incident Management provides one of the quickest
ROIs to the company.
Everyone will use the Service Desk for resolving IT
problems and will see the benefit it provides.
Incident Management readily provides metrics by its
verynature (e.g. numberof incidents, number resolved
within a defined time window, etc.), providing a great
start to implementing metrics.
Information that is captured by the Service Desk and
Incident Management is very useful in measuring
other IT areas (e.g. Change Management).
Service Desk
Establishment of metrics should be part of the Service
Desk implementation but a decision needs to be
made as to what Key Performance Indicators (KPI) will
be used. With the service desk, the key information
to capture is the number of calls, the duration of
calls, how many calls were abandoned, how many
calls escalated to tier 2, etc. With those metrics, it can
be determined as to how
many calls were resolved by
first level support, known
as First Call Resolution.
There are additional key
performance
indicators
that can be created, but at
a minimum FCR needs to
be implemented. Goals
can be set to increase the
FCR, and these goals can be
reached through training,
knowledge management
tools, and mentoring of
the Tier 1 service desk
personnel.
Incident Management
Most companies have tools for creating incidents,
tracking them and closing them when resolved,
but what they don’t have is effective methods for
resolving issues in a consistent manner. Too often,
the root cause analysis and resolution is based on the
skill set of the tier 1 support person, rather than by
practices followed by all the support personnel.
When implementing Incident Management, it is
important to deploy performance measures and at a
minimum, the following should be captured.
• Incident Management measures and Key
Performance Indicators
• Total number of incidents
• Number of severity 1 incidents
• Length of time to resolve severity 1 and severity
2 incidents
• Number of incidents reopened
• Hours needed to resolve incidents
• Number of incidents resolved within service level agreement
Incident KPI:
• Incident resolution rate (severity 1 and severity 2). How many incidents were fixed within agreeable
service levels.
• Incident reopen ratio
• Hours spent per incident
An effective Service Desk and Incident Management process will provide the impetus to tackle more complex
areas (e.g. Change Management) as a company begins its journey to an IT Service Management company.
My thanks to Randy Steinberg, Jim Huddleston, and Chuck Shmayel for their contributions to the article.
The Service Desk as the first point of contact plays an impor-
tant role in the Implementation of ITIL
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