Seeing the big picture: Service management status reporting

hello and welcome to the service management show from the team here at EIC code I'm Gary bar and I'm one of the itm practice leads here and in this episode we're going to be talking about the service service management status reporting and the importance of visualization and this month I'm joined by a special guests who I'll let introduce themselves hi everyone I'm Dan TS I am a solution architect uh here at outfire right so um first of all service management status reporting kind of what is it really um so anyone who's involved in service management will know that one of the things you always asked to do is to produce reports and dash BS what sort of reports and stuff have you have you kind of seen then uh anything really I mean a lot of what I was doing uh when I worked in a retail business was just um a big service dashboard of all the uh m services that they had so they were a uh food retailer so any kind of deliveries and when they were going in and out of the warehouses they had to know if certain conveyor bels were going down if trucks were not going out of the bays and it was like the complete management of that so that was it was really interesting but it was a lot of lot of green and red lights at any one time yes indeed um yes and you're quite right it can vary can't it so I've seen like like you I've seen various things I've seen seen some businesses that have War rooms and they'll just have lots of screens with loads of charts and flashing green and red lights and uh things like that and then I've seen other teams that just basically do the basics really I mean typical meas stat reports that you'll need that in service management teams are interested in things like ticket volume current ticket status service status service outages um but it can include other things as well and we'll probably get touch on some of those uh a bit later but it can include things like Financial data that's something which I know if you're running teams that are running a service desk where they're providing a service that's paid for they need to track costs and and revenue uh we'll talk a little bit later I think probably about risks um certainly risk management and visualizing risks is quite a tricky thing um and one of my favorite areas which is experience management so things like xlas cats NPS that sort of thing um so I thought the best thing to do is just talk about some of our experiences you mentioned one there um talk about some of the challenges we've faced and and how we overcome them so have you got a good example that you can draw on yeah I mean one of the big challenges I had uh it was at the same one but I've got a few for sure uh I've seen over the years but it one of the big challenges we had was it's great bringing in this data uh and doing some centralizing now that's challenge number one is actually how do we get the data where do we need to get the right data from uh and who needs to see it but then how do you interpret that data to be able to actually be efficient and productive from it like how do you know if you're seeing that your ticket volumes for incidents have gone up 10 times obviously there's an issue but what does that actually mean so you know is it because one of your services is just shot to Pieces is it because that actually you're not dealing with incidents as quick as you thought you know what what is the the root cause of that analysis and I know obviously that kind of feeds into management of what might be but it that's that's a big challenge that I've definitely seen I think probably the first one I I would bring up is uh is the million dollar question which I'm often asked by a lot of um customers is what should we report on yeah yeah absolutely and um and the answer normally is whatever's important to your p p so if you know depending on what you're trying to deliver as a service team you really want to understand how effective or efficient you are being delivering that service then that's what you measure and that's what you report on but I of find it quite funny like what does everyone else report on it's like well it's it's not the same yeah just because people report on changes doesn't mean that change is important to your piece you know some other team might look after that say it's irrelevant yeah yeah indeed um and again sort of addressing those that I mean talked about the the retailer that was obviously a very comp complicated one but what sort of techniques have you used in terms of like producing reports uh I mean I I personally have only kind of worked where the teams are working because it's where it's as close as possible to the data I know you can get a lot of very good connectors nowadays you know and it limits but because it's live data effectively you can try and be as proactive as possible rather than waiting a day to get your next day's report whatever it might be so I always try and work where the the people art now for me that has been a lot of time within atasan so I trying to get um things out of JSM if they natives of jur service management or actually just creating a decent Juro dashboard and collecting information from everywhere we can uh you know the first thing obviously as you said is like what do you want to report on but uh you know we'll we'll look at trying to create um numbers cuz they're more important not trying to create big filter lists uh so trying to say You Know What's um your creative ver has resolved over time what's the what's the numbers is it going up is it going down have you got better SE seat scores than you had last time for example so it it gives you a really good holistic picture and then if there is a problem you can drill from there I it's a really good point the trend is often more uh informative than the number itself I think yeah it's a very very good point um I mean something which I was chatting to um customer week or two ago and we were talking about um sort of meantime to resolve and meantime to acknowledge and things like that yeah empty to the uh I know we're talking about wanting to measure that uh against individuals and I'm like it's doesn't really tell you much because you don't really know what was going on in each of those events I said what's more important to understand is collectively your operations team is it trending up or down and more importantly are you getting spikes you so when you're looking at the data you want to be able to visualize it in a way where you can see where there's a where there's a blip and then maybe when there was a blip Tred to find out why there was a blip and probably it was a blip because lots of things were going wrong so yeah absolutely I mean I I'm not a massive fan in this also go cuz i' I've worked for both itm and and more agile teams I don't like the idea of individual based reporting not a fan of it and I know a lot of companies try and do it but it it's there's a level of gamification and then there's full on targeting because the tickets that I might deal with I might get a lot more but they're really really easy whereas you get the really complicated ones and therefore you're more likely to miss your slas or your xlas or whatever you have in set in place and it looks me makes it look makes me look amazing not so much for you but you're actually the one dealing the more important work yeah yeah exactly yeah you get lots of false positives if you drill down that deep so certainly if you're looking to like look at the trend you need to look in the round rather than at the individual levels the same with if you're monitoring you got like monitoring tools that you're receiving event data from and again you want to be able to see when you're getting those spikes you know maybe if you're a retailer for example you'll probably find you're getting those spikes at weekends or in evenings when an online Tor CU that's where most people do their online shopping um so you want you want to see that in the round you don't necessarily want to kind of drill down into individual monitoring tools and different things to try to see what it is um so uh terms of like you know presenting the data you mentioned we we main talk about jro you mentioned jira dashboards um is there any other kind of methods that you've used to present that kind of status reporting data any other methods outside of J dashboards I found that a lot of teams like to see things in spreadsheets and and sometimes some data you can visualize quite nicely in a spreadsheet um you know I'm not talking about you know States reporting it's in like probably like monthly like you generate like a monthly status report and sometimes uh you want that kind of pivot table of information which shows kind of you know these are the types of tickets we had and this was the average you know meantime to closure that sort of thing I'm I have fully only understand that Marketplace apps obviously being out far there's a a slight we do yeah we we've got a few uh and that's obviously the the slow plug but um I I again I understand why people want to take some of that data out they might like you said they could be pivot tables it could be that they need to put that data in the data Lake for you know future um reporting exactly right so there's a lot of other things and Native full native Juro functionality is is okay it's not perfect but it's okay which means that you have to go to Marketplace apps if you want to keep it within Jiro so a lot of companies may look and say actually well because we already have these tools we're just going to take it out and do it there I prefer personally again as I said to try and keep that data within it so you know we've got a jxl which is a spreadsheet like um app that can give you all of those MTS and everything within jir we've got dashboard Hub which obviously allows people to build these much more comprehensive um dashboards within jira I mean it is good being able to drill down that far I personally see much more benefit in just saying okay the trend of a time if you're seeing that your numbers are going up then you can go from there but you want your dashboards to be like the the first thing you check but not spend two hours on every single day cuz you want to get on to the work yeah it's the visualization it's the thing that gives you that kind of key indication or the helicopter view as some people would sometimes call it yeah yeah exactly um okay so I thought we talk a little bit about sort of um visualization of stat reporting best practices so the sort of things that you need to think about when um looking to do any kind of status reporting um so I'll I'll start off with my first recommendation or suggestion which is who is the audience because often often a lot of the bad examples of this I see is people collect all these wonderful statistics and they produce these beautiful dashboards and then nobody actually looks at them because it's not yeah it's not in their interest we've all been there yeah well it's also the same for project updates when you think PM spend ages no one reads them yeah s so yeah who who's your audience and I think you mentioned a good ex good one there actually which is something uh as service management teams we often get sometimes your audience is actually the customer uh so you're having to present that information to the customer so again if if if it's the customer you're presenting some kind of status report or visualization to you got to think very carefully how you present that information to them I think with customers it's really good to kind of be as transparent as you can I think that if you can maybe not necessarily give names about particular agents that looked after your work but being able to say you know on average a out of 10 tickets were perfectly within SLA and these are that I think you have a much better relationship when you can present that type of information to them um but yes obviously you do need to be slightly more careful about not showing all of the all of the Hope any sort of uh tips from yourself uh I think the first thing you need to do is make it as easy as possible I again try and be proactive about trying to show this information so if you have a portal like uh functionality for your customers give that information to them there right as they're raising tickets let them see that data obviously be uh up front and maybe is part of your contract you have to send an email with an ni produce report every month or whatever it might be but give them that information to digest it when they're ready so you know if you can like I said if you have this portal try and find something that says here's a list of the the 10 tickets that he created here's who created them here's the topic and the area that you having issues with and did we resolve them within time um now another sort of um common phrasee you here is garbage in garbage out so the the other my next tip really is making sure that the data that you're using underly data you're using is accurate yeah triage yeah it's important to understand where the data is coming from and if you're requiring your team or some kind of um you know automation or algorithm to manipulate that data then obviously you need to make sure that it's reliable yeah absolutely in fact I would say bad data is worse than no data so yeah it can give certainly the wrong interpretation of your of your ability indeed uh any any others from yourself well I was just about to say so this is somewhat on effective triage right so being able to spot signs of you know is it just a a bad badly created ticket is there things that we can change on like just custom field data how would you solve some of that first like first interaction with a bad ticket that's a good question um I think you have to understand why you're getting that bad data I guess um I I mean to be honest with you most of the time you're getting bad data it's normally because there's some kind of manual step involved and humans yeah whenever there's a manual step you're likely to get in consistency so You' got a team of 10 people you might find that a third of your team fill things in beautifully and they you know they recording Tim is are good you you'd know this working with project team recording time is a classic example of this you take a sample set of 10 people a third of people will record time really accurately and diligently another third of people will kind of go yeah that'll do and the other third will forget um and in many ways that's worse I said bad data is worse than no data um so yeah I think that's that's normally the starting place for me is to understand where is the inconsistency occurring or where is the bad data occurring and normally it's not always the case but normally it's it's because it's a manual step and where possible I think with any kind of status reporting you want it to be um what's the word I'm looking for you want it to be inherent you want it to just the data to be generated as you do stuff rather than things that uh you have to manually track but for some things you do like only a person can really say how much effort they spend on something I about yourself uh I mean I I think a lot of it starts with about knowledge so you know if you are my customer you raise a ticket as an agent I need to be able to physically understand or be able to interpret and the only way I can do that is be is have as much knowledge on my services as I can because at that moment I could say oh this is raised under the wrong request type or it needs to be escalated this team not that team and all of that information is what would eventually go into a status report you know who who's been hit the hardest with escalations this month you know what's gone wrong and and if I don't know as as my first line a defends that level of knowledge the report is immediately wrong yeah indeed uh okay and the the other one I was the other question I was going to ask really is you mentioned it actually briefly then when you talked about real time data and dashboards and you mentioned about like doing like a monthly report or something like that what would you consider the kind of best use case for those so when is it a good idea to use a dashboard and when is it a good idea to like generate like a a report I think you actually had it which is a your target audience yeah yeah of course yeah because your your service managers or your agents or your direct customers are going to be the ones that maybe care about having a dashboard right there and then and I know I'm generalizing slightly but they're going to be those whereas in your Executives the people that are signing and agreeing the contract are going to care about that status report of like actually are we going to get our money's worth and that's going to come from that monthly report style yes I would agree with that yeah generally the kind of yeah executive summary or anything contractual I also think some data we talking about earlier really we're talking about measuring some data you need to look in the round and so you need to look at the longer term anyway I me good example of like xlas when you're looking at xlas you tend to look on like a quarterly annual or by annual basis you know you're not looking at at like weekly or whatever so you can have a dashboard but that dashbo is going to tell you the last quarter rather than like you know real time information yeah it's I I guess there's a maybe it's the period of time so if you want proactive you want day-to-day Runnings whereas the longer longer longer you get you're moving more to that summary you're right and in a war room you want to know what's working and what isn't and what major incidence you've got things like that and you know that's the kind of real time thing uh right okay so um we sort of finished off now obviously invited down on who's from appfire who do have got a lot of these app I should say on the atasan marketplace reporting is probably the most popular third party app yep uh and also outside of uh just atlassian you know you've got powerful um dashboarding tours like Tableau and power behind and all these other things and the good thing is that all these things work with most service management tools anyway including JSM but uh you guys have got some interesting ones you mentioned one um the other one I wanted to sort of mention was your risk management one which we're a big fan of um do you want to just give a bit of background to that and why that kind of visualization is useful yeah absolutely um so hedge is a risk management app so it's fairly one thing I will say is it's Cloud only uh just for those that are still on DC uh but the risk management app for us is eventally the ability just take in all that data no matter what it is so if you've got if you literally have risk as an issue type for example or you have mitigations whatever it might be is been able to rather than just have a bunch of custom felds which says you know maybe this is your inherent risk this is your residual risk we can now visualize it with color now as humans we are far more visual than we are um I always forget what it is uh not audible whatever it is readable yeah yeah to we yeah we a Picture Tells a thousand words and all that yeah it does right so by being able to say okay this is a dark red risk therefore that like kind of means that is going to be much higher um inherent risk much more likelihood of having maybe it's much higher impact and therefore that's going to be the one that your businesses are going to want to focus on rather than maybe like your Your Light blues maybe your trivial ones so hedge is is very customizable so you create your Matrix you design the scoring system to fit your business and then it just does that visualization as and it does the classic risk Matrix thing yeah absolutely for those if you're not aware um in the industry there ar