For those of you that are culinarily inclined you will know that a soufflé is made with a couple of basic ingredients; a cream sauce and egg whites, and yet the final dish remains elusive to the many that simply don’t pay attention to the details for prerequisite success. Oh, and such success is wonderful to observe - fluffiness contained within a towering cloud of caloric goodness - it is truly an elusive culinary accomplishment.
Figure 1 - The rare object d’art itself - a light fluffy soufflé produced at L’Atelier by Joel Rubuchon.
Like the fracturable soufflé, good service desk reports are easy to order but more difficult to enjoy.
Although the ingredients are simple, the execution is questionable and the ultimate result is often unsatisfying. The particular reports I am thinking of are not operational in nature (the wham bam thank you ma’am of reports). The ones, I am thinking of are tactical in nature. These require a little more finesse, they are the thinking persons’ report, a tactical view of service desk performance that can enable service improvement and actually inform decision making. In other words, reports that provide information that is ‘actionable’. How delicious!
Anyhow, so many of these failed attempts leave me wanting more. Inadequate execution reduces them to merely visually appealing, useless and perhaps even inconsequential.
So perhaps we should examine the ingredients and execution that can turn a miserable meaningless humble report into something worth consuming.
Ingredient 1: Consistency
Consistency is one of the few things that matter when generating decision support material. Everyone should be saying the same thing when answering the telephone, asking the same questions, and documenting the information received in the same way.
Ingredient 2: Track the right stuff!
Set yourself up for success and build a support model. Outside of the obvious items like impact, customer information etc. there are three things that the service desk needs to capture:
#1 –what was the customers’ perception of the failure (i.e. the end to end service),
#2 - what was the underlying IT reason for the failure (i.e. the provider service) and,
#3 - finally what infrastructure item was involved in the failure (i.e. the component category).
See the figure below to see a breakdown of the critical criteria that should be captured in the incident.
Figure 2 - The essential elements of information capture for an Incident.
These items enable simple and easy information gathering from the customer plus makes escalation of the issue through the IT organization easier to manage.
Ingredient 3: Focus on the WHAT, the WHY and the ACTION.
Generating reporting for reporting sake doesn’t work. It sounds obvious but many of us get in the habit of reviewing the same reports every month and then do nothing with the information.
If this sounds like you, STOP!
Ask yourself three things when looking at a report:
Do I care about what this report is telling me?
If your answer is NO, move on and deal with something more important.
If your answer is YES, then you need to figure out WHY the information in the report is occurring.
Once the WHY has been determined, implement a performance tweak or involve the relevant stakeholder group and share the information with them as part of the ACTION.
In my next blog (on Monday), I will explore a real life example of how this process works.
Charles Cyna Uncategorized Customer Contact Details, Help Desk, Incident Management, Incident Type, IT, IT Service Desk, ITIL, ITSM, Performance Tweak, Reporting, Service Desk
