Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Pink Elephant IT Management Metrics Benchmark Service Blog #2

New Change Management and Updated Incident Management Benchmarks

We now have preliminary Change Management (CHG) Benchmarks and updated Incident Management (IM) Benchmarks based on the initial responses to the Change Management Metrics Survey and additional participation in the Incident Management Metrics Survey. The more participants in all our metrics benchmark surveys, the better! Thank you to the many that have participated.

We welcome your feedback. Please comment on this blog post to let us know what you think.

Change Management Metrics Benchmarks

The Change Management survey responses have been less diverse than the Incident Management responses. There are a few surprises in the early data. It remains to be seen if the values hold as the responses become more diverse.

Interesting Change Management metric and attribute correlation coefficients include:
> IT Staff FTEs and RFCs per month, .66 – This is similar to the correlation of IT FTEs and Incidents per month. This relationship is surprising in that it is only .66. IT FTEs are indicative of the size of the IT environment. Certainly the larger the environment, the more changes would be going on.
> % RFCs Right First Time and % RFCs without processing issues, .56 – This implies that organizations that have well managed changes also enjoy high change success rates.
> % RFCs Right First Time and Years Change Management Deployed, .69 – This remarkably strong correlation suggests that the longer an organization has been managing changes in a defined process, the better the change success rate.
> % Emergency RFCs and IT Staff Size, .55 – This correlation is similar to the RFC and Incident correlations with IT Staff Size. The fact that this correlation is lower than the RFC correlation is a sign that larger IT environments have proportionately fewer Emergency Changes than smaller environments.

Incident Management Benchmark Update

The only significant Incident Management correlation coefficient is the number of IT FTEs and Incidents per month at .66. This is not terribly surprizing, as IT FTEs is an indication of the size of the IT environment, and a larger environment would be expected to have more incidents than a smaller IT environment.

It is still surprising to see that despite the increased number of respondents, the proportion of the participating organizations with no documented Incident Resolution Interval Expectation us remaining high at 20%.

Data qualification/rationale:

The metrics and the organizational attributes in the ITSM Benchmark survey responses cover a wide spectrum. All survey response options have been selected by participants with no strong bias to any one response to any question. Medians and Means are approximate as they are based on range mid-points and estimated minimums and maximums where required. Since the survey uses non-linear ranges to ease data gathering and response by survey participants and except where the response options are narrow, there is a fairly large difference between the Median (center point of all responses ordered by value) and the Mean (normal average: total of all responses divided by the number of responses) drawn from the survey responses.

 

Monday, August 29, 2011

Another App for Vegas

We have spoken in the past about PinkAPP and Twitter  and Color  as useful smart-phone applications to enhance the experience at next year’s conference.  Here is another for you to consider: Skype.  Not everyone is aware that Skype is available for smart-phones: download the app now.  Instead of making a phone call home, make a video call.  If you are from overseas, take advantage of the conference-sponsored WiFi to make the call for free.

Just be careful where you are when you call.  What happens in Vegas…

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Let’s Not Overthink ITSM

One of the things I like about this conference - and about the stuff Pink Elephant produce - is that it is not over-theoretical.  It doesn’t disappear up its own fundamental.  The conference - and Pink - are about practical pragmatic stuff.  The slogan of the conference says it all: “knowledge translated into results”.  And I love reading Troy DuMoulin’s “Don’t Panic!” Blog for its practical goodness.

I’m deep in debate on my own blog, the IT Skeptic, with several over-thinkers.  Here’s my simple test: anyone who says ITIL is completely useless, an abomination, an offence to their superior ITSM knowledge… is over-thinking ITSM (or over-inflating their own genius, but that’s another issue). 

Sure ITIL has plenty of flaws and there are a couple of fundamental issues with it, and I have a good time criticising the movement and industry that surrounds it (including Pink at times).  But none of that means I’m throwing ITIL away.  Likewise I’ve suggested ITIL’s time in the spotlight may be coming to an end over the next few years (I’m backing COBIT to displace it) but that doesn’t mean it is dead - now or in the future.  There is a need for narrative guidance on IT Management, and ITIL does that well.  It could be better (couldn’t we all?) but it does well enough to retain it.  That’s why it is so wildly successful.  ITIL is good enough, and better than anything else around, with the possible exception of MOF and we all know why that hasn’t swept the planet.

So when the ITSM gurus start pontificating about how perfect ITIL is or about how useless ITIL is, or starts speculating about how many ITSM processes can dance on the head of a pin, call them out.  Anyone who knows IT knows ITSM. It is not encryption or ADSL or query optimisation or any of the other voodoo topics of IT.  It is not dense and highly technical with an enormous body of specialist knowledge like antivirus or object-oriented programming or networking.  Nor does it require any specialist skills.  You have to get past the secret handshakes and jargon like any body of knowledge, but the people with the little badges aren’t in possession of any advanced or mystical secrets that the rest of us aren’t.  Let’s get past this ITILier-than-thou posturing. 

We can have non-patronising discussions of ITSM which include everyone who’s done their time in IT as well as all those smart enough to learn the common sense principles.  We can come up with useful results without arcane flights of theory.  Happens all the time at the Pink conference.

Picture csp1344093 by lightkeeper © Copyright Canstockphoto.com

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Knowledge translated into results

The theme of the upcoming conference is “Knowledge translated into results”.  This invokes a number of ideas:

Knowledge

It is wonderful how knowledge can present new ideas that challenge thinking, or accepted ideas that institutionalise thinking, or anywhere across the spectrum in between.

Knowledge is indeed an asset of any organisation but only if it is being used.  Unlike some assets it has little or no value locked up in a vault.

Translated

All services use and need knowledge.  Knowledge can be

• the input to a process, the thing that a transaction works on
• the fuel for the process, that gives a transaction its energy or impetus, boosting the mind’s efforts
• the raw material for a process to make something of

Results

One popular model about knowledge is

data -> information
information -> knowledge
knowledge -> wisdom

Talk of “wisdom” always seemed a little conceited to me.  I much prefer the way this conference theme implies it

data -> information
information -> knowledge
knowledge -> results

Practitioners come to the conference to acquire knowledge, then return to the workplace to translate it into results.

The very best practitioners come back to the conference to share with us what they learned, so as to increase all our knowledge in a virtuous circle of improvement… and knowledge growth.

 

 

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

Susan Greenfield on Mind Change

One emergent theme of PINK12 is the affect of modern technology on the mind.  We have Nicholas Carr on The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains and Dr. Joanne Cantor on Conquer Cyber-Overload.

Anyone who doubts the impact of the internet and connected technologies on the human mind should listen to Susan Greenfield on Mind Change .

This is no crackpot theory. This is Susan Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at the University of Oxford, and former director of the UK’s Royal Institution.

Get a Feel For the ITSM Extreme Makeover

If you haven’t checked out the ITSM Extreme Makeover blog yet, I commend it to you.  Christina told us all about it just a few days ago.  There is a lot there - the staff of UTHSCSA are recording their experiences as they go.  It is worth the effort to read through: the stories are compelling, and the trends are interesting. See what impressions you form.  Here’s what I picked up.

Jerry McCarty was right:

I was thinking this might be like the Extreme Makeover Home Edition, where we go on vacation and come back to something new and improved… I realize this is more like Extreme Makeover Weight Loss Edition, for there is a lot of work ahead of us in creating a lean, world class service desk.

 

If you read right back to some of the early entries you will see how much it is like a weight-loss challenge.  The first posts belie a little nervousness and uncertainty, and even a whiff of the blasé.  then come the initial enthusiasm and excitement as the programme gets going, followed soon after by discomfort and embarrassment as bright lights are shone and searching questions asked and unfitness is exposed.  There are a few revelations about what the gap is between current health and the optimal state.

Then comes new excitement and new enlightenment as the team begins to learn what slim looks like, how fitness feels, what the path is to get there.  There are several mentions of “a-ha!” moments, flashes of insight.

Now the latest posts are those of a slogger, sweating on gym machines, head down and working hard, the goals are understood and the commitment has been made and the pounds are being shed.

I found it a really interesting read.  If you are serious about effective change in your own organisation, you must understand the culture of change, the human processes we go through.  The ITSM Extreme Makeover blog is giving us a distilled essence of that culture on a compressed timeframe.  Priceless.

P.S. To really soak up the experience, follow ITSMExtreme on twitter