Entry Software Corporation

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ITSM

IT Incident Management System Metrics

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What is an effective incident management system and what metrics are important to track? It is often referred to as taking action to restore regular service operations quickly while minimizing the negative impact on business operations. Managing incidents effectively is an essential piece for providing quality customer support and maintaining business continuity. The lessons learned can also help teams improve their current processes to prevent future incidents.

Benefits of an effective incident management system:

  1. Increased productivity and efficiency
  2. Higher level of service quality
  3. Visibility and transparency
  4. Valuable IT service management documentation
  5. Enhance end-user satisfaction
  6. Knowledge base documentation for reference

The self-service portal is the single point of contact for the users to report any incidents. When well-designed, the portal provides the user guidance ensuring the reported incident has all the pertinent information required to assist the L1 help desk. Well-documented service requests can be resolved in an efficient manner and routed to the appropriate team or individual quickly for resolution. This will also reduce the back-and-forth email with the customer for request clarity.

Incident Management Metrics 

There are 3 major factors through which an incident order is decided upon: Impact, urgency, and priority.

Impact – How a business is affected by an incident?

Urgent – How urgent the incident is and how much time it will take to be resolved? 

Priority – What is the priority of the incident ? (Low, Medium or High)

5 steps of incident management:

  1. Incident Reporting communication begins at the time an incident is identified to acknowledge to the user or business that disruption is taking place and investigation is in progress.
  2. Incident Escalation occurs when an incident triggers an alert and the proper procedures are performed by the individual who is assigned to manage the incident.
  3. Investigation and Diagnosis IT team performs analysis, then staff can investigate the type, cause, and possible solutions for an incident.
  4. Resolution and Recovery  involve eliminating the root causes of issues and restoring systems to full functioning operation. Resolving an incident also includes documenting the findings and steps taken to restore service.
  5. Incident Closure communicating and confirming from users that the service experience is normalized ensuring customer satisfaction is met.

How to Measure Service Level Agreements

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As an IT Manager, you are tasked with developing to measure Service Level Agreements, (SLA), understanding compliance to the SLA and taking corrective action when violations occur. Help Desk systems create significant volumes of “dark data” that, when mined, provide insight critical to achieving organizational service and customer satisfaction objectives.

Let’s look at the types of information you can use to measure service level agreements.

We can consider that there are different reporting objectives when measuring SLAs.

  1. Customer specific – did we meet our goals?
  2. Staff centric – how are our team performing and are there any trends that are contributing to SLA violations?
  3. System-centric – are there patterns in your IT stack that are creating an abnormal trend in SLA violations?

Ideally, you will isolate six to twelve metrics that will help you answer the questions above.  Here are some examples for you:

Customer specific metrics:

  • reaction time,
  • resolution time,
  • compliance to agreed deadlines

Staff centric metrics:

  • Abandonment Rate: Percentage of calls abandoned while waiting to be answered.
  • ASA (Average Speed to Answer): Average time (usually in seconds) it takes for a call to be answered by the service desk.
  • TSF (Time Service Factor): Percentage of calls answered within a definite time frame, e.g., 80% in 20 seconds.
  • FCR (First-Call Resolution): Percentage of incoming calls that can be resolved without the use of a callback or without having the caller call back the help desk to finish resolving the case.
  • TAT (Turn-Around Time): Time taken to complete a certain task.
  • MTTR (Mean Time To Recover): Time taken to recover after an outage of service.

We have reviewed what to measure now let’s cover the how to measure aspect.

Of course, if you have a tool that will pull all this data together for you into a single view, then that is the ideal.  However, if not, then here are some critical considerations for you:

  1. Keep the number of metrics small, six to twelve, no more. If you have too much information, it will be difficult to wade through and challenging for anyone to assemble regularly.  Too many metrics could lead to the abandonment of this important process.
  2. Trend the data over a period. I suggest that you have thirteen weeks of data to compare and graph.
  3. Because you want to see how performance is comparing to the goal, make sure that you put the goal beside the metric.
  4. Incorporate this report into you weekly team Traction Meeting and use it to identify SLA, team or IT issues. See Six Ways to Strengthen your IT Organization.

Entry Software has been working with IT organizations since 1998 and can help you develop your Service Level Agreements, and provide you with the information you need to measure them.  Learn more about their integrated help desk and project management solution, TeamHeadquarters or get a demo of TeamHeadquarters today.

The Business Benefit of a Service Level Agreement

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Benefits of a Service Level Agreement

Recently I met with a client specializing in the service level agreement parameters of high-speed internet to residential and commercial customers. I was invited to help develop a customer retention and acquisition strategy.  The firm needed a way to differentiate their company from the competitors so that the clients wouldn’t jump ship when their contracts expired.  They also needed a way to attract new customers and felt that the service their company provided was superior to that of the competitors. They asked me my thoughts on this, and I recommended that we evaluate the use of Service Level Agreements to keep clients and attract new ones. [Read more…] about The Business Benefit of a Service Level Agreement

IT Management | Strategic Thinking

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An IT manager called me the other day and says, “What can you do to help me achieve my IT strategy?” Great question, says I; tell me your strategy, and I will see how I can help.

The next five minutes I had to endure metaphors, vaguenesses, and I saw it was coming, “I do not have a defined and written down strategy” (aka, I have no idea what a strategy is but it sounded impressive didn’t it), realization moment.  Can you say, “Awkward?”

How do you help someone who knows they need help, yet is unclear about why and how?  You ask questions.

[Read more…] about IT Management | Strategic Thinking

6 Steps to Reach ITSM Implementation Success

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Below are six steps you can take to elevate ITSM success. IT service delivery excellence is not an accident but due to the deliberate implementation of ITSM best practices.  Do you know what it is required of you to take ITSM to the next level? How can you leverage ITSM to deliver excellent IT services? Here are some tips.

1. Evaluate The Maturity Level of Your Current ITSM

First, you will want to assess your present situation before deciding to change your current people, processes, or technology.

Assess the success of the processes and people you have in place and ask yourself if they are the right people or the correct process. Now is the time to handle employees who are resistant to change or are regularly involved in a conflict.

Does the technology you currently rely on support your company culture and address the needs of your organization? Are your Service Level Agreements (SLA) and Operational Level Agreements (OLA) meeting the needs of your customers? What maturity level do you need to achieve?

2. Define Your ITSM Goals

Well-communicated and defined goals will help people across all levels of the organization to better understand IT’s intentions thus avoiding resistance to potential change. Defining your long-term goals paves the way to achieving those goals when setting short-term objectives.

IT service management aims to implement people, process, and technology effectively to deliver valuable services to your customers. Therefore, it’s essential to define KPIs or key performance indicators that will be used to identify success and progress about achieving your goals.

3. Gain Management Buy-In

Without upper management buy-in, your project will likely never push through. Don’t neglect the function and importance of upper management which will be crucial to help you secure time, money, and people. Present management with clear and concise explanations of the value that service management brings to the organization and how it impacts the bottom line.

4. Assemble an Effective Team

Define and document the roles your company needs to succeed. Identify the people you already have and their skill sets. Identify any gaps and align the people you presently have with the roles they can fill. If necessary, change the roles of individuals who do not fit your customer needs. Hire people with the right skills to fill resource gaps you cannot fill with existing employees.

5. Improve Service Through Automation

Automation has become necessary in today’s modern business environment with the benefits of decreased costs and higher productivity. There are significant improvements to service management, thanks to automation. Automation has dramatically decreased the risk of human error while recurring processes can be easily implemented and maintained resulting in increased productivity. Automation has also provided a significant improvement in customer service and the customer service experience.

6. Select the Right ITSM Software

The right ITSM solution will help your organization minimize the impact of issues, increase team accountability, reduce overall operating costs, and boost productivity.

IT teams want to provide the most modern user experience, implementing a simplified yet comprehensive ITSM software solution is ideal. The solution that best fits your business needs should be user-friendly and consolidate ITSM functionality into a unified system that has an interface that’s responsive and easy to use.

ITSM success is achievable through proper planning, regular communications, and smart implementation. It also involves the diligence to select the right ITSM solution for your organization that will complement your efforts.

TeamHeadquarters service and help desk provide your IT services team with a secure, role-managed ticketing system that includes an easy-to-use, responsive interface. And its Service Desk contains essential components of Gartner’s ITSSM and ITOM Tools.

For a personalized demo, click here.