Operational Monitoring and Continual Service Improvement

Interfaces to other Service Lifecycle practices

Key Performance Indicators

A KPI refers to a specific, agreed level of performance that will be used to measure the effectiveness of an organization or process.

KPIs are unique to each organization and have to be related to specific inputs, outputs and activities. They are not generic or universal and thus have not been included in this publication.

A further reason for not including them is the fact that similar metric s can be used to achieve very different KPIs. For example, one organization used the metric ‘Percentage of Incidents resolved by the Service Desk ’ to evaluate the performance of the Service Desk. This worked effectively for about two years, after which the IT manager began to realize that this KPI was being used to prevent effective Problem Management, i.e. if, after two years, 80% of all incidents are easy enough to be resolved in 10 minutes on the first call, why have we not come up with a solution for them? In effect, the KPI now became a measure for how ineffective the Problem Management teams were.

This section has focused on Operational Monitoring and Reporting, but monitoring also forms the starting point for Continual Service Improvement. This is covered in the Continual Service Improvement publication, but key differences are outlined here.

Quality is the key objective of monitoring for Continual Service Improvement (CSI). Monitoring will therefore focus on the effectiveness of a service, process, tool, organization or CI. The emphasis is not on assuring real-time service performance; rather it is on identifying where improvements can be made to the existing level of service, or IT performance.

Monitoring for CSI will therefore tend to focus on detecting exceptions and resolution s. For example, CSI is not as interested in whether an incident was resolved, but whether it was resolved within the agreed time and whether future incidents can be prevented.

CSI is not only interested in exceptions, though. If an SLA is consistently met over time, CSI will also be interested in determining whether that level of performance can be sustained at a lower cost or whether it needs to be upgraded to an even better level of performance. CSI may therefore also need access to regular performance reports.

However, since CSI is unlikely to need, or be able to cope with, the vast quantities of data that are produced by all monitoring activity, they will most likely focus on a specific subset of monitoring at any given time. This could be determined by input from the business or improvements to technology.

This has two main implications:

• Monitoring for CSI will change over time. They may be interested in monitoring the e-mail service one quarter and then move on to look at HR system s in the next quarter.
• This means that Service Operation and CSI need to build a process which will help them to agree on what areas need to be monitored and for what purpose.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23