As organizations grow, the IT processes that support them need to mature. I like to use the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) scale when thinking about IT processes. The CMMI scale was invented by Carnegie Mellon University in 1987 and has five levels of maturity: Level 1 – Ad hoc – Processes are done uniquely …
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I’ve encountered a lot of confusion about the difference between Metrics, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and Critical Success Factors (CSFs) so let’s talk about that.* First let me just say that Metrics unto themselves are useless. This is a Metric. Isn’t it lovely? Just a dot on a graph. Of course it has a value …
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When I took my ITIL v2 Manager’s course with Pink Elephant, one of the most interesting sessions we had was about the four categories of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and how they must be balanced. The KPI categories are similar in concept to Kaplan and Nolan’s Balanced Scorecard. In the class we discussed the four competing quadrants of KPI …
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A friend of mine manages a hosted ecommerce solution and was complaining to me the other day that people in his organization were putting unauthorized code onto production servers without going through the typical deployment process. His team would discover this when upgrading the customers’ ecommerce sites. During the upgrade, they would stumble across some …
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From Back to the Future Part III Doc: No wonder this circuit failed. It says “Made in Japan”. Marty: What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan. Doc: Unbelievable. Remember Datsun? Remember the Datsun B210? Wow, what a piece of crap. That thing would rust if you looked at it …
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From the ITIL Community Forum Q: I am reviewing the current response and resolution time metrics for an internal service desk that supports a 10,000 person company.  Currently the company uses 4 severity levels for incidents.  While I realize the response and resolution times are defined by an SLA, is there a good benchmark to …
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From the ITIL Community Forum Q: One of the tasks I have coming up is to complete a maturity assessment within our organisation with regards to Service Management. I am planning to use the CMMI model and the ITIL processes to come up with a questionnaire to pose to key stakeholders.  However, with the customer …
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