If you can’t measure it, you will never be able to manage it.
When you think of measuring what you do in the IT operations and services, you must answer the following questions-
- How happy are the customers of the IT services you provide?
- How many failures are caused to the business users due to the IT services?
The Metrics
By using metrics, you can quantitatively describe the process which is being measured. These define what should be measured and how. There are three types of metrics that must be measured-
- Technology metrics includes component and application metrics
- Process metrics are defined by CSFs and KPIs
- Cost Metrics
When you move down, measuring will get more integrated. Technology is easy to measure as compared to processes and services. The end-to-end service measurements include various components, processes, and methodologies. Whenever you are considering measurements, it is very important to define realistic but challenging targets. A good target is always smart; it should be specific, measurable, relevant, and time-bound. These metrics and measurements must be used on every page of the service lifecycle. The practical usage is for everyone. With this, the customers will know when the incident will be solved and how much they have to pay for the service, how long do they have to wait and the service test on the back of the same bill number, which problems to solve first and how to manage the efficiency of the processes within the organisation and so on.
Measure User Satisfaction
Most organisations measure satisfaction when they are very close to the incidents. To ensure that you get the best possible feedback, there are some of the things that you need to do-
- Make it easier for the customers to provide you feedback for staff, a single button click must be all it takes to respond to how happy they are with your services.
- Provide them a mechanism so that they can optimally give you a score. Ideally, it’s allowed them to answer in their own words within a general category.
- Don’t start asking too much information from the users. If they are telling about the survey that takes more than a few seconds, they will definitely give up without submitting any response. A lot of users do this and that formed state becomes very low and you might end up with poor quality data.
- Publish the feedback that you get and show how you are using it to improve your services. People are very likely to offer you good feedback if you are analyzing all their feedback properly. If you are not going to use the data for continuous improvement, then there is no point in collecting it.
You can compare your own performance with that of the other Managed IT service providers for better feedback.
Measuring Business Disruption
It is very important to collect data on the actual impact of business incidents. These are the ones that measure the duration of the instant by comparing it to the time when the incident is roasting the business to the time it’s done. This makes it very difficult to prioritize when you are planning improvements to demonstrate the impact, IT services might have created. If you don’t already collect this type of data, you must consider it. Collect all the data that makes it easier for you to analyze the business destruction so that you are able to overcome it the next time with relevant and effective service improvements.
What should an IT department know about the metrics?
The measurement of business disruption is an option and user satisfaction is valuable and will help you in making the best possible use of measurement in planning and development. Some of the other IT service Management metrics that you might find useful are given below –
- Your metrics are never your goals. This explains the importance of understanding how they affect human behavior.
- Defining metrics for the help desk is very important. It suggests specific objectives and knowledge processing units which might help you to measure the effectiveness of a help desk.
- How you should manage the beauty of IT services. This is something which discusses the necessity of understanding how services and support business processes impact the success and failure over different time periods.
What is important for the customers
Whenever service providers think of any services, they must pay special attention to what’s important. The value of service, the costs, the intended outcomes, and the race are really important when it comes to analyzing your customers.
- Value is a measure of all the advantages that the service creates for a client. This can be in terms of money or other things from the customer.
- Outcomes at the end of receiving the services
- Costs are the expenses of the money that the customers try to achieve as per the outcome they want.
- Risks are those possible events that could affect the ability of a customer to achieve their desired outcomes.
If you know what’s important for the customers, you’ll be ever to understand the metrics very well.
Conclusion
It all depends on how well your organization collects all the data. Are the users willingly offering you feedback or the uses of has a very low response rate and so on? These are some of the questions that will help you organize the metrics in a systematic way. What about the business description and how do you know which service leaves due to the most lost working time for the uses for staff? Will you have to publish this data along with the trends to help the users see the impact of improvements? These are some of the questions that will be answered with the help of the metrics described above. If you really want to improve your business, you need to collect good quality user feedback on the closed incident so that you are able to evaluate the response of the customer very well.
