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Delivery

Usage

Customer Satisfaction

We further agreed that Delivery, for most services, would be further broken down into Availability, Speed, and Accuracy. This was especially useful since the most contentious measurements resided in the Delivery category. Most of our service providers were already collecting and reviewing measures of Customer Satisfaction through the trouble call tracking system surveys. Usage was a “safe” measure since rarely does anyone consider usage numbers a reflection of their performance.

Since we expected the most pushback from the Delivery measures, we hoped to ease the resistance by using the three areas just mentioned (triangulation).

So, the root question, and our higher-level information needs were identified easily. Of course we still had to then identify individual measures and their component data. Before we did this, we needed to know which services would be included in the report card. We needed to know the organization's key/core services. A service catalog would have helped immensely, but at the time, this was lacking. In many organizations suffering from organizational immaturity, much of the prerequisites for a solid metric program may be missing. This is one of the reasons that using a metric program is considered a mature behavior.

While trying to implement a mature behavior (like a metric program) in an immature organization can be rife with problems, if done carefully it can actually act as a catalyst for moving toward maturity. In our case, the metric program clearly helped the organization think about and move toward developing a service catalog. While it had been identified as a need long before the metric program was launched, the metric effort helped focus on the deficiency.

Another behavior encouraged by the Report Card would end up being the more consistent and accurate use of the trouble call tracking system. Since a large amount of data (for almost all of the services included in the Report Card) relied on this system, the organization had to become more rigorous in its use of the system.

Until the organization documented a service catalog, we did our best to identify the services that would be considered core by the majority of the organization.

Being an information technology organization we had a lot of services and products to choose from. Some of the key services we chose included the following:

Service Desk

E-mail

Calendaring

Network

Telephone

These services were easily accepted as part of the core services we provided. For each of these services, we built a template for collecting measures in the areas identified. This template would include the service, the type of information (category) to be used in the analysis of the health of the service, and specific measures that would be used to answer the root question. The results are shown in Table 9-1.

You may have different services to look at. You may be, for example, in an entirely different industry than the one I'm using in the example. Even if you have the same services, you may have different categories of information and therefore different measures.

I'm going to focus on only one area, Service Desk, to continue this example, but I want to first explain the “not applicable” measure for usage of e-mail. Our organization provided the e-mail for our customers—basically as a monopoly. Our customers had no other choice for their work e-mail. They could use other e-mail services (Gmail, for example), but it would have to go through our system first and then could be auto-forwarded. So we started with “not applicable” and didn't measure usage for e-mail. We also did not measure usage for Calendaring, Networking, and Telephone, for the same reasons. While we didn't use a measure for usage in these cases, there are measures that could have been used.

For e-mail we could have used Percentage of Use and the Number of Customers who Auto-Forwarded their e-mail to a different e-mail provider.

For Calendaring we could look at Frequency of Use, and Percentage of Features Used.