ITIL Reporting

March 28th, 2014 | Posted by Don Boylan in ITIL
Q:

Will any one be able to share sample reports for all the process & Service Desk from real world.

I am creating long list of reports for each of the process, would like to view what my fellow ITILers are doing with the reports as well.

A:

I don’t have a list of reports that can be used to measure the effectiveness of all the ITIL processes, but I do report on my area of responsibility in my organization.

One of the things that should always be kept in mind when designing reports is that the reports must balance against four different (and potentially conflicting) aspects:

1) Compliance – Is the process being followed. Are the policies being upheld.
2) Quality – How well is the process being followed. How well are the jobs being performed.
3) Performance – How quickly, how many, how efficiently, etc
4) Value – Show me the money

If you are measuring a Service Desk’s speed of answering phones, you may be measuring Performance. If there is a policy that the caller must not wait on hold more than X minutes, then you may be measuring Compliance.

But that metric is in no way measuring Quality or Value. In fact, I can answer the phone, say “Hello, goodbye”, hang up, and make my Performance and Compliance metric look great. At the cost of Quality and Value.

Measuring Value is probably the most difficult. “Show me the money” is the question that process improvement is hardest to show, except in perhaps Problem Management. But you should still find metrics to measure the money saved due to increased performance, decreased down time, etc.

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