Many IT organizations still struggle with performance measurement, particularly when their formal metrics don’t match business perceptions of IT. To help, here are a handful of IT metric improvement tips:
- Be clear on the purpose of your metrics - ensure that you use metrics for productive reasons, such as driving improvement
- Avoid having too many metrics - use only the metrics you need and report on only what’s important to stakeholders
- Measure what’s important AND in the right places, so this would be at end-user touchpoints in many instances
- Take your IT metrics beyond your IT operations - instead, align the metrics with desired business outcomes
- Understand the context of metrics and how different metrics are related - also ensure that you understand the behavioral aspects of the employed metrics, i.e. where the metrics drive the right and wrong behaviors in people
- What’s important today might not be next year - so periodically review your metrics, changing metrics and/or targets as appropriate.
What would you add to this short list? Or would you like more detail on what I mean? Perhaps you disagree with me (which is often a good thing)? For any of these or any other comments, please add a response. Thanks :)