Metrics. Measurement, metrics and KPIs

Measurement

Measurement, metrics and KPIs

Service Operation audits

Regular audit s must be performed on the Service Operation processes and activities to ensure:

• They are being performed as intended
• There is no circumvention
• They are still fit for purpose, or to identify any required changes or improvements.

Service Operation Managers may choose to perform such audits themselves, but ideally some form of independent element to the audits is preferable.

The organization ’s internal IT audit team or department may be asked to be involved or some organizations may choose to engage third-party consultancy/audit/ assessment companies so that an entirely independent expert view is obtained.

Service Operation audits are part of the ongoing measurement that takes place as part of Continual Service Improvement and are discussed in more detail in that publication.

This section has focused primarily on the monitoring and control as a basis for Service Operation. Other sections of the publication have covered some basic metric s that could be used to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of a process.

Although this publication is not primarily about measurement and metrics, it is important that organizations using these guideline s have robust measurement techniques and metrics that support the objective s of their organization. This section is a summary of these concepts.

Measurement refers to any technique that is used to evaluate the extent, dimension or capacity of an item in relation to a standard or unit.

• Extent refers to the degree of compliance or completion (e.g. are all changes formally authorized by the appropriate authority)
• Dimension refers to the size of an item, e.g. the number of incidents resolved by the Service Desk
• Capacity refers to the total capability of an item, for example maximum number of standard transaction s that can be processed by a server per minute.

Measurement only becomes meaningful when it is possible to measure the actual output or dimensions of a system, function or process against a standard or desired level, e.g. the server must be capable of processing a minimum of 100 standard transactions per minute. This needs to be defined in Service Design, and refined over time through Continual Service Improvement, but the measurement itself takes place during Service Operation.

Metric s refer to the quantitative, periodic assessment of a process, system or function, together with the procedure s and tools that will be used to make these assessments and the procedures for interpreting them.

This definition is important because it not only specifies what needs to be measured, but also how to measure it, what the acceptable range of performance will be and what action will need to be taken as a result of normal performance or an exception. From this, it is clear that any metric given in the previous section of this publication is a very basic one and will need to be applied and expanded within the context of each organization before it can be effective.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23