Search Blog

Tag Cloud

Latest Posts Acquisition  Change Management  Coaching  Doing More With Less  Federal Contracts  Information Technology  Inherently Governmental Functions  IT Service Management  Leadership Development  Organizational Performance  Program Management  Risk Management  Succession Planning 

Subscribe

Email:
	Subscribe  Unsubscribe

RSS FEED

Subscribe!

Metrics that matter

Posted on 08/15/2011 at 08:00 am

In today’s business and government environment, it is imperative for company or agency IT shops to measure their performance.  To do so, however, is not straight forward and must be well thought out in order to achieve real value.  Performance measurements must put results into business relevant terms and show value to the business/customer.   Many IT organizations are good at detailing how the engine works, but not how well the car drives.   It has never been more important to communicate the business value of IT due to increased fiscal pressures, and tremendous information security and control concerns.  Business needs to understand the strategic advantage of IT vs. only the ongoing costs associated with it.  Performance measurement and reporting also aids in building a common lexicon between IT and business, demonstrates IT’s business contribution, and provides clear business and IT alignment enabling responsiveness to changing economic conditions and opportunities.

A good approach is first to develop a balanced IT scorecard that maps clearly to the overall business objectives and strategy.  This scorecard should then be used to drive performance and is measured through the gathering and analysis of metrics that matter.  Metrics development therefore, should relate directly to the IT scorecard, which in turn should map directly to the overall organizational strategy.  Metrics should also identify trends and drive continuous improvement.  An example of balanced scorecard categories could include:

• Business Value
• User Experience
• Operational Excellence
• Continuous Improvement

Measurements, associated targets and trends should then be created to support visibility into performance of these scorecard items.  A lot of thought should be put into the development of these metrics, however, as they can quickly become burdensome to capture, create heavy reporting requirements and become irrelevant by failing to answer the “so what” question.

For example, reporting how many calls a helpdesk receives in a month is worthless to business by itself, however, translated into how many calls were resolved within an agreed upon SLA shows clear alignment to customer satisfaction and maps directly to the scorecard.

Developing metrics that matter is therefore critical and should be meaningful.  Metrics should capture relevant performance targets, indicators and trends, should have clear management ownership and accountabilities, and drive improvement investments.

The following metrics are just a few examples of measures that align to business objectives, demonstrate performance, and provide opportunities to improve.

Business Value

• Number of projects aligned to strategic objectives
• Number of projects in the pipeline, with scope, schedule, cost and quality measures
• Strategic vs. maintenance investment budget

User/Customer Experience

• End user response times – target, actual performance, and trending
• Number of hits and time on strategic web site per user
• Performance against agreed upon Service Level Agreements (SLA)

Operational excellence

• Critical application availability (from a user and performance perspective)
• Critical incidents – number, status, Mean Time To Repair, business impact, and trending
• Problem investigation – Number open, current state, aging, and trends
• Security Compliance indicators
• Number, type and impact of outages related to change

Continuous Improvement

• Employee training statistics
• Number and type of enhancements and defect repairs delivered to critical applications
• Number of process improvement indicators and impacts – SDLC improvements, manual to automated control improvements, change management process improvements, etc…

These are just a few metric ideas, but there are hundreds of possibilities.  The key is to create a well rounded critical set of metrics that represent strategic business value.  They should measure the “right” things as well.  For example, measuring a critical server outage on July 4^th may have huge statistical impact, but have no business value due to the holiday.  On the other hand, 100% availability of a server is a worthless measure, if it’s performance is terrible.

Finally, metrics should not just be used for just measurement reporting, they should also help drive improved performance.  Used properly, metrics can demonstrate IT value to the business and aid in investment decisions.  They should be used to initiate valuable discussions with business to relay perceived IT performance.  If business does not agree with the results, then it is time to revisit your metrics.  This also goes a long way in building strong business and IT partnerships.  The conversation can shift from continually looking at the cost of IT to the IT value proposition.

- Chris Turpin, Senior Consultant

Tags: Information Technology