You can’t always go home again, but you can use Continual Service Improvement (CSI) to meet the changing needs of your customers.
I recently posted a blog about returning to a service desk I had managed and spoke about how the changing business environment had impacted management’s ability to sustain the current list of Critical success factors (CSFs) and Key Performance indicators (KPIs). The 1st question that was asked was “What should we measure?” Within the new business reality we reviewed how the corporate vision, mission, goals and objectives had changed? We spoke with service owners, business process owners, business analysts and customers and asked what was critical to them. What services that we were providing was creating the most value to them and enabling them to meet these new goals and objectives?
Management then identified the gaps of “what we should measure”, to “what we can measure”. From this a more customer focused list was developed. The overriding objective of these new service measurements was to provide a meaningful view of the IT service as experienced by our customers. The three key areas that customers most cared about were:
- Is the service available?
- Is it reliable?
- Is it being delivered with the proper level of performance?
Service desk along with Technical Management began to tie incidents to particular CIs and measured component availability. Management reviewed the “Expanded incident lifecycle” and reliability of services and components. They measured the maintainability of components and CIs tied to particular service incidents. They measured the serviceability of their suppliers to meet contracted services. From a performance perspective they worked with capacity management and tied performance related incidents of services to components and CIs. All of these positively impacting the availability and reliability of those critical business services on which the customer depended.
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