Are you an Industry Leader? Improve your Standing with Performance Analytics

[dangrady510]

I want you to follow me on a little trip down memory lane…   All the way back to Kindergarten.

Every day when I'd walk into class, I'd take off my puffy Michelin man coat which I had to hang in the closet and then shut the door. On that door was a big grid on a piece of yellow oak tag.   Along the left hand side was a list of all the kids names in the class, and across the top were the days of the month.

What was in the grid?   Stars, smiley face Stickers, checkmarks. I'm sure this part varied from class to class, but this grid, this "scorecard" is how the teacher managed her class and drove the outcome he/she wanted — "Good Behavior".

If I was eating the paste, what did the teacher say?

"Dan, stop eating the paste or you won't get a star today."

And what did I do (most of the time)? I stopped eating the paste.

Why?   Because there was no way Greg B was going to have a star today and I wasn't.   I'd have to listen to him the entire bus ride home.

This is a very primitive version of something many of us in the business world still do today: we use performance metrics to drive behaviors and improvements.

In order for these metrics to be useful, they need to be used in a comparative manner.   These comparisons usually manifest themselves in 3 ways:

• Comparison against a goal or a target — Star or no star for a given day
• Comparison over time or trends — How many days in a row have I gotten a star?
• Comparison to my peers — How many stars do I have compared to the others in the class

All three of these are examples of Benchmarks.

For several releases now, ServiceNow Performance Analytics has given you the ability to create and leverage the internal benchmarks of your organizations performance trended over time and in relation to established targets and goals.

As of Istanbul, ServiceNow is offering access to external benchmarks through the HI Service portal so you can start comparing the performance of your organization to others in your own industry or companies of similar size.   External metrics are important because without them, it is sometimes difficult to get a sense of what "Good" performance is.

Currently ServiceNow provides access to benchmark data for 6 KPIs:

• % of High Priority Incidents
• Average Time to Close High Priority Incidents
• Average Time to Close an Incident
• % of Incidents Closed on First Assignment
• Average Time to Fulfill a Request
• Number of Knowledge Base Views

For each of these you get your organizations monthly performance (for the last 6 months), and the ability to compare yourself to the Global Average, Industry Average, or companies of your size.   More details can be found here.

This is extremely valuable information.   But for the areas in which you are under performing in relation to your peers, where are your opportunities for improvement? For those areas in which you are a leader how do you maintain and improve upon that excellence?

For example, which of my high priority incidents were the results of changes? Did we have a higher number of emergency or unplanned changes this month that could have driven that percentage up? Which Business Services are carrying the largest volume of these high priority incidents?

For average time to close, where are the throughput issues?   Which groups are holding on to these incidents longer than others?   What state are they sitting in — are there a bunch that are "Awaiting User Info"?

Is a metric simply being driven up by a data quality issue where we have incidents that have been assigned to an individual who no longer works at the organization and need to be reassigned?

To continue to improve we need the visibility and flexibility to ask and answer these types of comparative questions.

ServiceNow Performance Analytics provides both.

And it does this with information that is available in real-time, not just a month at a time -     allowing the organization to become more responsive to opportunities as they present themselves.

Here is the part that I think is the most compelling — if you are a ServiceNow customer, you not only have access to the external Benchmark data provided in HI, but you have access to a complimentary version of Performance Analytics to start your internal benchmarking process.

If you aren't already leveraging it — here's how.

Maybe this is the paste talking, but I'd love to see the impact on the external benchmark data if the entire ServiceNow community was taking full advantage of internal benchmarking capabilities available to them.

We'd have a grid full of stars and Greg B would have to keep his mouth shut on the bus ride home.

Other Performance Analytics Blogs

Opportunity is what happens when we are busy preparing data

Context: The ABCs of Performance Analytics

Stakeholder Usage — A Critical KPI for Analytics