Service Reporting

Tue, 21 Sep 2021 16:29:24 GMT

I am interested in finding out how other organisations have approached the issue of performance reporting across Service, Practice/Process, People, Vendors etc utilising functionality available on the ITSM system.

I have worked in organisations which have permitted a 'free-for-all' approach which resulted in the generation of many, many one-off performance reports and others which restricted access down to a minimum. Wonder who has experience of where either of these have been deemed to be successful or a disaster.

Has anyone actually developed a Reporting Service with the required expertise centralised and a request process utilised to manage the demand. I suspect the 'agile' ones amongst us will have a problem with that 'controlled' approach.

Would appreciate any comments, thoughts and/or advice.

Many thanks

Mark

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 17:36:06 GMT

Hi Mark, like you I have worked in may places where reporting is either way over the top or just too late. Having said that I have worked in places that have been really good. One place I worked we spent several weeks designing and developing a core set of 16 reports which covered everything we needed to track and manage to demonstrate performance achievement and improvement. In the two years they ran them no other reports were developed and when asked for we worked on the 80:20 run as to whether they were necessary or not.

I have also worked in a number of companies (and am currently) where they have a reporting team who consider, accept, reject, develop, test and issue all reports. Reports were / are requested via a service request, use fills out a form and the request goes off to the reporting team. This sounds fantastic until you find out that min turn round on a report request is 4 weeks, most people want them now.

Most ITSM tools allow for some level of ad hoc reporting (depending on license type but as you say that can result in hundreds of reports being generated when standard ones are available, even if they are not made generally available they still take up storage and in some cases the queries are so complex they slow the system performance for everyone else down.

The best reporting I have come across was where a reporting tool such as Business Objects (it was not BO but a far simpler tool) was provided to everyone who could then create their own dynamic dashboards to sit on their desktops so a Change Manager could have their view of change data and a change analyst could have a different view but pulled from the same data. The underlying data was a mirror of the operational date so did not slow operations down but had data replication between the systems to ensure data currency (not completely up to speed on how they did that), users had the ability to 'Customise' their views and run a limited number of queries against the data.

Only advice I will give is if people want reports that are non standard or do not support the current measured service levels or targets then ask why they need it, what added value does it bring and is there any report currently in existence that provides the same info but displayed slightly differently. Occasionally you will come across a requested report that adds value and may even replace other existing ones.

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 16:18:04 GMT

Hi Mark,

Great question and I'll try not to repeat points from the excellent response from Richard.

The first step in these situations is to recognise there is an issue with reports that should be the same, but when published are not. The good news is this seems to be something there is awareness in the organisation in question...and worth ensuring the key stakeholders agree this is the case and is an issue to be addressed.

In my experience three things tend to come up when there are issues with reports:

1) Data Quality - this is the bane of service reporting. The source data isn't accurate or consistent, and can lead to results and reports that are no longer trusted. This can be fixed and tends to take time, effort and focus to resolve.

2) Different views on how measures are reported - this tends to happen where there isn't a common agreed service level backed up with measures (and targets) where it is clearly defined how the source data is used in the calculation of the reported figure(s). I've worked in organisations that avoid formal Service Level Agreements for a range of reasons, and seen this more often where this is the case.

3) Report results taken a different times - service data can and will change over time. If one report takes data at the end of the last working day of a period, and another takes a cut of the data at say the 5th working data then some results will be different. This is where it helps to agree to consistent and common point at which the "single version of the truth" data is extracted for all reports.

To answer your question I have managed a central service reporting function, typically alongside service level management as a discipline. Upside was it became a centre of excellence for service reports, and could generate reports that local teams didn't have the skills to do. The down side was it could feel controlling, did at times get too focussed on the beauty of the report versus the value and accuracy, and could be a bottle neck.

Like Richard I have positive experiences of using the latest Business Intelligence tools to automate and improve service reports. My last couple of consultancy engagements on this have recommended use of BI working towards an online dashboard for service, With automation this means we are no longer getting a single report at the end of a period, and can have live dashboards allowing quicker course correction for any emerging trends.

Hope that helps. I have a hunch we'll get to this topic in one of our Community of Practices

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 16:11:43 GMT

Thank you to both Richard and Mark for your advice and feedback, all of which rings true with my experience and current challenges.
We do have a number of reporting tools available with our current ITSM which do provide different types of reporting. I am proposing that we go down the route of a Reporting Service but am also aware of this 'controlling' negativity with the comment that 'surely industry-leading ITSM systems should allow anyone to produce any performance reports' type of input. My preference is to develop a small number (as per Richard's approach) of relevant performance reports which support some simple performance improvements and then develop from there. I have also been emphasising that, in my experience, a set of graphs does not a report make, it is the interpretation of that data that really turns the data into knowledge which then supports continuous improvement.

Mon, 4 Oct 2021 13:17:50 GMT

Quote:

Originally posted by M. Grant:
Thank you to both Richard and Mark for your advice and feedback, all of which rings true with my experience and current challenges.
We do have a number of reporting tools available with our current ITSM which do provide different types of reporting. I am proposing that we go down the route of a Reporting Service but am also aware of this 'controlling' negativity with the comment that 'surely industry-leading ITSM systems should allow anyone to produce any performance reports' type of input. My preference is to develop a small number (as per Richard's approach) of relevant performance reports which support some simple performance improvements and then develop from there. I have also been emphasising that, in my experience, a set of graphs does not a report make, it is the interpretation of that data that really turns the data into knowledge which then supports continuous improvement.

No problem and glad the responses were useful to you.

I know what you mean about graphs not making a report. One of the reporting teams I worked with had a very complex graph in a monthly report which showed multiple layers and dimensions of a particular area. It was incredibly hard to reach any conclusions as knowledge or insights from that busy graph. So I made a point of asking "so what does this tell me" for a couple of months, and we got to a better discussion about why I was asking that every month and how to improve the report!