The Quest For The Holy Grail: The 5 Best Metrics For Your Team (1 Of A 2-Part Series)
By Israel Lang, Executive Consultant, HTG Peer Groups
I was asked this month to provide you with the 5 Best Metrics for Service Delivery Management. That task is pretty easy. I would guess that given an hour or so, I could probably give you 40 important metrics.
In fact, I know I could because a few years ago I led a discussion on this very topic with about 50 other very smart service delivery managers, dispatchers, lead engineers, and other service executives from organizations of all sizes and maturity levels. We spent twenty minutes just brain dumping metrics that we thought were important. When we got done, we had four giant flip chart pages full with ideas. Many of which I couldn’t argue with as being important. At the time I stood back looked at our work and quietly shook my head.
I see this same largess of data in many of the organizations that we consult with on a regular basis. We walk into their service areas and they have their PSA systems, their daily reports, and their giant monitors with rotating numbers and charts.
During my time with the individual techs, I ask them some simple questions like how many open tickets do they have or how many tickets the team as whole has open. Most of the time I get blank stares back.
I ask them what success looks like for them … same response. I ask them what they think of the big monitors around the office, and they smirk and give me a wink-wink and nod-nod.
In both cases the question that runs through my head is “So … now what?” With a good PSA tool we have instant access to lots of data. So what? What do these “metrics” mean? Am I actually measuring things that matter? And assuming I know what they mean, what am I supposed to do now? How do I use this data to help give my team clarity around and drive performance?
This is our problem. The constant search for the holy grail of metrics keeps us on an elusive hunt that is often fruitless. In the absence of knowing the “5 Best Metrics for Service Delivery Management,” we try and cover our bases by doing one of two things: We either suffer from metric envy or we suffer from metric overload.
- Metric Envy. We may look to the more experienced guy from a larger company that is seemingly performing better than us, and we adopt his 5 metrics.
- Metric Overload. Or we measure 40 things in hopes that within that mass of data, the 5 important pieces are contained. After all, what gets measured gets managed, right? The problem is we are often either measuring and managing the wrong things, or we are measuring too many things and managing none of them.
Do you recognize yourself here? Are you more prone toward Metric Envy or Metric Overload? I think that if we are honest with ourselves, each of us has struggled with both issues at different points in our careers.
Metrics do matter. However, there is no one-size-fits-all set of 5 perfect metrics for every company that will motivate all of your techs and give you the easy to understand data by which to make consistently strong decisions.
That is why it is even more vital that we learn how to thoughtfully choose our metrics.
In my next post, I will lay out the process and principles I used when I was a service executive and what I teach the companies I consult with about determining what should be measured and managed.
I would love to get your feedback or perspective so comment below, e-mail me, or start a conversation on Twitter.
Israel Lang is part of a team of coaches and consultants serving the IT industry. Prior to joining the HTG Peer Groups staff, he spent almost 20 years in various roles in service and operations at a solutions and managed service provider. Israel’s company was a member of HTG for many years, and he is a strong proponent of the peer group experience. He loves helping companies go further faster through developing executives, managers, and teams into effective leaders who reach their fullest potentials. You can reach him at ilang@htgpeergroups.com or on Twitter @israellang.