Has anyone created and implemented an ITIL Executive Mangement dashboard?  If so, what components have you used?  Has it proven to be successful and help the executive management team understand the performance of the IT organization (good or bad)?

Kind of an Answer:

Ok, here is a funny story that is somewhat related:

In a previous company that I worked for I created a very nice monthly executive dashboard report that showed the KPIs for the Service Desk. It included First Call Resolve vs. Ticket Volume, Incidents by Division, High Impact Ticket Trend, Hour of Day Breakdown, Shift Breakdown, VIP Ticket Trend, and Top 5 Software Tickets amongst others. They were all presented in wonderful and easy to understand bar graphs.

Another section of the dashboard was a Customer Satisfaction Survey Trend graph that showed the results of a randomized survey sent to users who had their issue resolved on first call. This was actually a very manually intensive portion of the report because it required me to do massive data scrubbing to determine if the survey response was related to a “First Call Resolve”, or just a user venting their frustration at IT.

We found out in early spring that our group was going to be outsourced at the end of the summer. I immediately stopped the sending out of surveys since I knew that from this point on all bets for “Satisfaction” were off. But I still continued producing my report. I just included the March results for every month (the last month before we found out about the outsourcing initiative). In August my boss called me to tell me that I had made a mistake in the monthly report. I had apparently pasted in the results of March’s survey.

I said that he should look at July’s report…. And then at June’s report… And then at May’s report…. etc.

I fessed up that I had stopped updating that portion of the report as soon as the outsourcing was common knowledge and that March’s data was the last attempt to gather the information. He seemed a little upset, but I told him that the data would be skewed from that point on due to the lack of motivation in the remaining Service Desk personnel. Also the fact that my efforts seemed to go unnoticed for four months implied that he really didn’t have a defensible position.

I was released from the position in the outsourcing a few weeks later and have since used him as an excellent reference and had a couple of job offers from him to do some contract reporting.

If ever you find yourself in a similar position, try just leaving portions of your “mandatory reports” unchanged from previous reporting periods. See if anyone notices. You might be surprised.