IT is a large and growing slice of the overall budget for many companies. That money spent on IT is anticipated to create business value and support business growth. However in many IT organizations, a considerable percentage of this budget and IT labor is consumed on managing of incidents. First, second and third tier levels of support along with support technology and tools can become expensive to retain and maintain. In fact this is unplanned work which inhibits value creation and business growth. Many people will advocate a solid proactive problem management process to eliminate the root cause of these incidents and I am right there alongside them. However, I think we need to look even earlier in the service lifecycle. The standard statistic that I see most often quoted is that up to 80% of all incidents are cause by undocumented and unauthorized changes.  So for the sake of this argument let us take that as our baseline and discuss critical success factors facing service ...

A learner who is working towards developing a Cost Management department recently asked about key performance indicators (KPIs) for the Financial Management and Service Asset and Configuration Management (SACM) processes.      ITIL 2011 actually maps Critical Success Factors (CSFs) to KPIs for each process.   Key performance indicators for Financial Management can be found in section 4.3.8 of the Service Strategy book while those for SACM can be found in section 4.3.8 of the Service Transition book. While I cannot list all of the KPIs for both processes, here is a good sample: Financial Management The financial management for IT services framework specifies how services will be accounted for, and regular reports are submitted and used as a basis for measuring the service provider’s performance. All strategies have a comprehensive analysis of investment and returns, conducted with information from financial management for IT services. Internal service ...

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 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.  We could then determine the services that were creating the most value  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-centric 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 thre...