Context: The ABCs of Performance Analytics - Part 2

[dangrady510]

This is the second post in a 3 part blog series focused on how Performance Analytics enables you to run a better ServiceNow by adding CONTEXT to the valuable data living in the platform.

In the first post, we focused on adding the context of TIME and how trend-based data gives us visibility into the momentum of the business and an understanding of whether we are improving or not.

In this post, we are going to look at how Performance Analytics gives us the ability to build relationships between the metrics we are tracking to help us better understand how actions we are taking are influencing the outcomes we are looking to achieve.   This context of INFLUENCE reveals not only what improvements can be made, but which adjustment will have the largest impact.

So let's look at INFLUENCE

"You're a bad influence"

Have you ever heard that?

Unfortunately I have — more than once.   However, I think most would agree that any road trip requires road trip food, and that every kid should know what a "noogie" is.

The actions in the above examples are clearly influencing the development of my waistline and the behaviors of my kids in a negative way.

Conversely, in order to influence positive business outcomes we need visibility into action-based data so we can make necessary adjustments in a proactive, not reactive manner.     Many organizations lack this visibility — in some cases because they don't have access to the data, in others because they are measuring KPIs in isolation.  

Performance Analytics gives us access to the necessary action-based data and a number of different ways to expose the relationships between the KPIs we are tracking so we can avoid measuring things in isolation and become more proactive in our decision making.  

Let's look at a few examples:

Action Based KPIs

Mean Time to Resolve is a common metric used to communicate the level of the service we are providing.       If we looked at MTTR in isolation we'd always be in a reactive mode. If the MTTR starts to increase we react accordingly, but it's too late because the customer has already been impacted.   However, if we start tracking the action-based KPIs that influence MTTR, like First Call Resolution Rate (FCCR) or Reassignment Count, we would have early signs of how our MTTR could be impacted.   An increase in FCCR will ultimately have a positive influence on MTTR, an increase in reassignments will have a negative influence on MTTR.

The Whole Story

If I look at this incident backlog trend (below) in isolation it tells a positive story - a backlog reduction of about 30% in the last month.

Now let's overlay the average age of open incidents over that same time period.

The story changes. Yes, our incident backlog is decreasing, but over that same time period the average age is increasing.   It looks as if people are cherry picking the newer, easier to resolve incidents and ignoring the older more challenging ones.   What will be the influence on our MTTR when these older incidents start getting resolved?     Layering different KPIs in a single visualization helps expose how things influence each other and what we can to adjust achieve the desired outcomes.

We want more!

There could be several factors that influence the outcomes you are trying to achieve and if we put 5 or 6 KPIs on the visualizations above they will start getting cluttered and difficult to read.   Performance Analytics provides an elegant solution for the situations that require you to communicate several influencing factors. It's called the Workbench. A Workbench Widget allows you to bring together a collection of different indicators, create contextual relationships between them and present a potential conversation to the stakeholder in a single screen.

With every click of a data point in the Workbench, the widget adjusts to show all of the influencing factors.   These insights help you point to exactly where to focus your improvement efforts.

If you are interested in getting a better understanding of the power of the Workbench widget for communicating INFLUENCE take a look at this recent blog post.

Spotlight

This last example of INFLUENCE I want to share introduces a new Performance Analytics capability available in the Istanbul release.   It's called "Spotlight".

The Spotlight functionality allows you to assign a score to different aspects of a piece of work (any record) in the platform based on how much influence it has.   This declarative predictive scoring helps you better prioritize work in the platform. What does that mean? Instead of using a single aspect of an incident - like priority - to determine where we should focus our attention, we can use multiple aspects of an incident — priority, state, age etc. to determine which incidents you should focus on first. This will drive better service for the end user.      

These are just a few examples of how Performance Analytics helps add more contextual value to the data in the platform by exposing how things INFLUENCE one another.

In the final blog in this series we are going to focus on the context of PEOPLE.   How do we take all of these insights and communicate them to the different stakeholders in the organization in a way that will impact the decisions they make?

Ultimately we are going to get the most value out of the data in the platform if it is making a positive INFLUENCE on the day to day decisions and behaviors of everyone in the organization.

Read Part 1 - Context: The ABCs of Performance Analytics

Read Part 3 - Context: The ABCs of Performance Analytics - Part 3