IT Department Performance Measures

Hi,

You can do this by establishing a service level agreement (SLA) with "the rest of the company".

Help desks best fit SLAs, but they can be applied to development teams too.

Typical SLA items for a helpdesk are...

Number of calls processed/month
Number of outstanding problems at end of month
Average time to answer a call (if your telephone system supports this)
Average time before a techie gets back to them
Average time to resolve a problem

Application uptime
Server uptime
Overtime cost

Development "SLAs" would be more based around meeting milestones, Number of instances of code that doesn't pass user testing and overtime...

I'm sure you can think of other things to measure. But that's the point. It has to be measurable. Oh, and at least vaguely important to "the rest of the company". :-)

In order to establish them? You need to run for a month or two simply measuring, take the results to "the rest of the company" and mutually decide on your targets.

Hope that helps,
Cheers,
Tim.

How effectively a department operates is a direct reflection on how effective the department?s manager is.

Some measure you can use to show your department?s effectiveness:

Network down time (maybe split out to show downtime for individual critical business processes)
Longest down time
Average time needed to repair network (or critical business process) outage (bring it back up)

If you provide Help-Desk support:

Average number of help requests received per day
Average amount of time needed to solve problem
Backlog (footnoted to show reasons ? i.e. waiting on vendor fix, low priority, haven?t got to it yet) (an ever increasing backlog may show problems in the areas of people management, time management, user education, etc.)

If you conduct software development:

Average length of project (either time or number of lines of code)
Number of ongoing projects
Percentage of projects completed on schedule (greatly dependant on the ability of the project manager to accurately forecast a project schedule and his ability to keep development team focused on the project) (also dependant on department manager?s ability to shield the development team from ?project creep?)

Some intangibles that reflect on a manger?s effectiveness:

Department morale (although this is usually readily apparent to anybody watching
Turn-over rate (can be a gauge of morale) (if this stat is used, make sure it is heavily foot-noted to show: ?for-cause? terminations, terminations caused by down-sizing/right-sizing/reorganization/etc., retirements, self terminations ? those looking for better pay/better work conditions/friendlier boss/etc.)

As a manager, you use many measures to determine the effectiveness of subordinates. Most of these same measures can be used to show your effectiveness.

(continued)

I suggest the "Top 10 List" approach. Compile a list of all the change requests, projects, etc that your staff is working on. Involve your upper management in prioritizing the list into 10 priorities, and meet on a regular basis. As jobs are completed, then you can list these as accomplishments and you can show that value was added. This list can be communicated on whatever basis needed, and if it needs to be larger than 10 that's fine - it's just so that everyone knows what's going on. I find that it is good to keep up with regular troubleshooting, but it's a little overkill to document each and every thing if it's the same thing over and over. For new and unique issues, we maintain a master document that everyone must use and they add documentation to this one file. Our environment is quite different than most, so customize accordingly.
Hope this helps

Many of today's executives have heard that they should be using quantitative performance measures - and who could argue this? But maybe one should look a little deeper into the need for quantitative measures; what purpose are they to perform?

We need quantitative measures so that we can define what needs to be improved - if anything - and to be able to determine whether any changes we made actually resulted in improvement. To do this, we need to have a clear definition of the steps that weshould follow and did follow. We also need the discipline that enables us to repeat those steps if necessary.

Please note that performance measures are intended to establish a quantitative baseline that will be used for improving the processes that are being performed by the workers. If these processes have not yet been identified, and/or if they are not repeatable (typically because each worker does it his own way), then a baseline is meaningless - and so are the metrics that can be derived for improving it. Therefore, before management requires that quantitative metrics be developed and used, they should insure that the fundamental concepts of process management (including the ability to define, control, repeat, measure and improve process steps) are in-place in their organizations.

Process management capability is often achieved by creating a "process identification and improvement team" to define desired processes and to create implementing procedures. This is the approachmost often selected, but it is an expensive one. Another way is to create a work-place environment that uses the normal work that the workers are already doing to fulfill not only process management needs, but also many other needs (without increasing anybody's workload.) You can find a source for this capability at http://www.adv-management.com.

Good luck.

Many of today's executives have heard that they should be using quantitative performance measures - and who could argue this? But maybe one should look a little deeper into the need for quantitative measures; what purpose are they to perform?

We need quantitative measures so that we can define what needs to be improved - if anything - and to be able to determine whether any changes we made actually resulted in improvement. To do this, we need to have a clear definition of the steps that weshould follow and did follow. We also need the discipline that enables us to repeat those steps if necessary.

Please note that performance measures are intended to establish a quantitative baseline that will be used for improving the processes that are being performed by the workers. If these processes have not yet been identified, and/or if they are not repeatable (typically because each worker does it his own way), then a baseline is meaningless - and so are the metrics that can be derived for improving it. Therefore, before management requires that quantitative metrics be developed and used, they should insure that the fundamental concepts of process management (including the ability to define, control, repeat, measure and improve process steps) are in-place in their organizations.

Process management capability is often achieved by creating a "process identification and improvement team" to define desired processes and to create implementing procedures. This is the approachmost often selected, but it is an expensive one. Another way is to create a work-place environment that uses the normal work that the workers are already doing to fulfill not only process management needs, but also many other needs (without increasing anybody's workload.) You can find a source for this capability at http://www.adv-management.com.

Good luck.