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Need some help for developing metrics...

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by ttosun

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I've recently been asked to develop some IT metrics to report on for the execs at my company. Although I can inundate them with server up times and information from gigs worth of log data I'm afraid translating that into something the business end of the company can understand is a bit difficult for me.

Some parts are easy. Help desk for example is easy to report on. How many tickets were closed, time to resolve, etc. I've got a reporting person who's also easy to report for. How many reports completed, time to complete, etc. But that's only two areas of IT.

What are some other areas I can report on without burying non-technical people with technical information?

-T

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by ttosun

Perhaps I can start another debate over the supremacy of Linux vs. MS vs. Apple. Then maybe this post can have 100000 replies.

by jamesrl

Do some reading on scorecards and balanced scorecards.

You really have to sit down with the execs and ask them what kinds of stats are relevent to them.

When I helped to develop such a scorecard for a previous employer, we had operational statistics (uptime, % of usage/capacity, # of severity 1 issues etc), departmental statistics (financials, staffing) and projects (on track for $, deliverables, schedule).

Its important to keep things simple. Good scorecarding can use combination metrics, and score them by green, yellow, red.

If you have too many measures, no one will read it all. Provide the combination metrics, present them simply and graphically, and call out key metrics every month. Have all the detail as an appendix.

KISS - if you don't know what the acronym means, look it up, you will need it on this kind of project.

James

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