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  • Whitepaper

Demonstrating Effectiveness Through Metrics with Marval

Demonstrating Effectiveness Through Meaningful Metrics with Marval ITSM

Content

The need for meaningful metrics

What are the reasons for poor metrics?

How will your managers benefit from clear reporting and metrics?

Suggested key analytics to report on 

Are your metrics giving the insight you need?

Marval Reporting and Dashboards

Benefits

The need for meaningful metrics

As employees, whether in admin, sales, finance, or operations, we all feel the pressure to demonstrate our value, justifying our role in the organization and proving our worth. 

For IT and service departments this is no different, our teams are subject to the same constraints. When it comes to promoting their value and communicating to the business what a good job they actually do, many IT departments are - at best - inconsistent and - at worst - totally ineffective. But, let’s face it, if we don’t demonstrate value for money, promoting ourselves and our successes, no one else will.

Communicating our effectiveness should be straightforward; collecting, sorting and reporting on data to provide meaningful, accurate metrics with which we can make informed decisions. Unfortunately, however, we often fail, with no clarity on how to collect these metrics or provide effective management information.

This white paper will provide easy-to-follow guidelines, helping you implement and maintain a successful approach to gathering meaningful metrics.

What are the reasons for poor metrics?

If metrics are so important, why do so many organizations find they are not fit for purpose? Is the business failing to identify what’s important to them and where to focus? Or is there a lack of suitable, accurate reporting software? Or is it a people issue with managers or employees not knowing what to do?

The reality is it’s often a combination of all these factors. 

While Marval may not be able to make a difference to all your people issues, there are fundamental ways we can help. Our technology will ensure you supply accurate, business-focused metrics which make you, your team and your boss look good - providing the evidence you need for service improvements and cost savings, and ultimately communicating whether the team is meeting internal and customer expectations.

How will your managers benefit from clear reporting and metrics?

  • Business aligned metrics will demonstrate value for money and organizational success
  • Clarity on the adherence to agreed service levels, response times and targets
  • Visibility of customer perception/satisfaction of the support service
  • Clarity of the number of requests not completed on time or rescheduled
  • Visibility of workload patterns and trends
  • Information about staff resource usage, workloads, and service availability by business unit
  • Seeing who is solving which types of requests
  • Understanding the time spent on requests, broken down by support group and individual
  • Identification of why service breaches occurred and their related customer satisfaction rating
  • Clarity of business areas and services that require improvements

Suggested key analytics to report on 

  • Occurrence (requests occurring the most often – by Business Service)
  • Time spent (areas taking up staff time)
  • Elapsed time (areas taking the longest time to conclude)
  • Service Level Agreement (SLA) and Operational Level Agreement (OLA) performance
  • Trends by: Hour, Day, Week, Month
  • Process performance analysis
  • Spent elapsed ratios by priority
  • Analysis by business impact
  • Staff workload and performance

Are your metrics giving the insight you need?

 

Common Issues

 Possible Solutions
1.

Inability of our technology to translate IT successes, or identified areas for improvement, into terms the business can understand or relate to.
  • Complete a detailed health check of your current product. If it is not fit for purpose, look to invest in a solution that incorporates management reporting and dashboards as standard
  • Design such reporting in at the start. Include relevant and useful metrics as a key requirement.
2. Data is inaccessible, with barriers affecting how the IT offering is presented meaningfully to the business and operational services.
  • Determine whether the issue lies with the product, the people or the process
    • If people, ensure training is implemented
    • If product, look to upgrade or replace
    • If process, examine it to identify gaps and initiate improvements
  • Focus on what’s important to the business
  • Decide what you want to report on before you define classifications
  • If you don’t use information, don’t waste time collecting it or reporting on it
  • Clearly define the scope your classification covers, involving appropriate support teams
3.

There is an inadequate transfer of knowledge between support personnel.
  • Invest in your team’s personal development and training
  • Train/educate all staff in service improvement plans, policies, processes and procedures
  • Consider the introduction of policy, process and procedure writing workshops
  • Consider communication workshops
  • Encourage team members to regularly present their successes as well as areas for improvement.
4.

Managers are spending too much time managing people who don’t want to deliver a quality service.
  • Focus on people aiming to deliver a great service - not those who don’t
  • Encourage assertive leadership and effective management
  • Ensure everyone has clear roles, responsibilities, objectives and agreed deliverables.
5.

Tolerating poorly performing colleagues.
  • Set and enforce minimum standards and codes of conduct
  • Apply strict process and procedure guidelines to all personnel.
6.

Teams feel unhappy about having to justify their existence.
  • Promote a blame free culture where shortcomings are viewed as opportunities for service improvement rather than failure.
7.

The benefits of following processes, and recording performance, are not clearly understood.
  • The team has to ‘own’ the support service taking personal responsibility for the design, operation and maintenance of the related policies, process, procedures and communications required to perform their roles.
8.

We are often reluctant to change, be accountable or move outside our own comfort zones.
  • Ensure everyone is informed and engaged early in new projects or changes that may affect them (remember staff still have their day job).
9.

Customer perception and expectation management is not prioritized by IT support. It may be felt that the only time feedback is received is when customers are complaining about poor service.
  • Keep customers informed (with good or bad news)
  • Effectively managing the customer experience, and therefore their perception, may be the difference between delivering poor service and great service
  • Ensure everyone understands what is important to your customer
  • Manage relationships successfully, understand other people’s needs and manage their expectations
10.

We create masses of reports that nobody reads, understands or cares about.
  • Maintain a reports catalog
  • Only create reports that deliver decision making information or invoke action
  • Make report ownership a necessity
  • Ensure reports are fit for the audience and written in a language they understand.

Marval reporting and dashboards

Within Marval’s integrated IT service management (ITSM) software is a powerful dashboard and reporting functionality. The system provides a high-speed and easy to use graphical reporting solution, also enabling you to create standard reports and management dashboards with a simple drag-and-drop interface. Marval’s solution will not only greatly reduce the design time associated with reporting, but also the dependence upon technical staff and specific knowledge of reporting tools. 

Providing access to data stored within the application databases - presenting it as useful, usable business-oriented information is integral. With our interactive user interface, you’ll benefit from a valuable and user-friendly business intelligence solution giving clarity to your service management status and reporting requirements. Here, you have the ability to deliver strategic management information data through real-time management dashboards. 

Accessed via a standard web browser, the interactive, graphical interface enables broad user access to view and interact with dashboards, drill into underlying data, and easily export reports in a variety of formats. Information is sourced in real-time, allowing staff to become proactive when applying their focus to business issues.

Just some of the benefits include:

  • Instant access to essential management information
  • Interactive dashboards for drill-down and cross filtering
  • Automated export and report scheduling giving you more time for analyzing rather than creating reports
  • Ability to align with good practices and standards
  • Easy collection of audit information supporting governance and compliance
  • Elevation of ongoing service and process improvement
  • Including report narrative as notes to help understanding of the data/information

Increase your capabilities, measuring your performance to concentrate on improving and managing delivery of service. Your views can be built from multiple data sources to enable cross-referencing of information and deliver valuable insight to problems, trends and successes helping you to:

  • Demonstrate that you deliver what you say you do
  • Identify service improvement opportunities
  • Show ROI - clear and tangible demonstration of value for money
  • Reduce the dependency on individuals to generate management information

Quality metrics provide huge benefits and a positive position by:

  • Demonstrating value for money
  • Promoting continued investment in IT
  • Driving professionalism and motivating staff
  • Promoting team building and communication
  • Maintaining business and customer confidence
  • Ensuring end-to-end service accountability

By aligning with Marval you are also aligning your management information, showing your value to your organization (and perhaps providing grounds for a pay rise!).

Marval’s award-winning, intelligent ITSM solution, helps organizations deliver exceptional, memorable and personalized service experiences. 

Employing a technologically advanced architecture and rich operational functionality, Marval provides you with a reliable solution to:

  • Achieve economies of scale
  • Introduce innovations smoothly and accelerate change
  • Support business decisions
  • Meet and exceed your organization’s critical objectives for compliance, governance, sustainability and operational excellence
  • Reinforce a customer-centric culture across the organization
  • Provide a world-class service experience

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