Food For Thought

Service level management – let’s get real!

I mentioned in a recent Post (“ITIL® 4 Compared to ITIL® 3” posted within the Group, ITIL® by ITSM Assist Ltd) that in my opinion, whilst ITIL® 3 served a purpose and clearly motivated through setting a standard (or more accurately de-facto standard), ITIL 3 did not focus on the practical side, whereas ITIL 4 clearly does take a more practical approach.

However, taking a practical approach, e.g., ‘walking-the-talk’ is music to my ears., rather than just talking-the-walk. Metrics and measures should be a truthful reflection of the customer’s actual experience and satisfaction of the service as a whole. And, we do not want claims of achievement based on superficial and meaningless metrics, measurement and targets!

Therefore, it is important to Engage and Listen to Needs and Wants, along with paying attention to issues, and concerns. We need to recognise the “watermelon effect”, e.g., whilst it appears to be green on the outside it is actually red on the inside.

For example, let’s say the IT service centre claim they have achieved their performance target, e.g., demonstrating that 95% of incidents were closed within the agreed service level target (SLT). However, when we take a closer look, we find that those incidents closed within the SLT related to the clock being wrong on the desktop. From a business customer perspective, I am sure the customer is thinking “whoopee doo, good for you, it must be tough at the top!”. So, what about the 5% shortfall the IT service centre failed to close? It transpires that this shortfall had significant impact on the business. What we have here is intrinsic (e.g., built-in) goals confused with contextual (relative) goals.

There is no surprise when the business customer becomes extremely frustrated and understandably annoyed when they see IT producing meaningless metrics and measurements, e.g., although something may sound impressive to IT, this may not be impressive to the business customer if during the period of unavailability or reduction in quality the business were attempting to run key transactions.

Given the aforementioned example, I wonder how the IT service centre would feel when claiming such SLT achievements the finance department were unable to pay staff on-time (including the IT service centre staff)?

So, in conclusion, if IT think they are doing a great job (e.g., the reports are all green) but their business customers are dissatisfied with the service received, and even more frustrated when IT do not even recognise this, this is what we refer to as the “watermelon” effect, e.g., it appears to be green on the outside but it is actually red on the inside.

Metrics and measures should be a truthful reflection of the customer’s actual experience and satisfaction of the service as a whole and not in part. In fact, IT as a whole (i.e., the teams within the IT organisation) and the business customers should operate on the basis of succeeding together or failing together, not in parts!