Set performance goals based on real-life IT benchmarks

[Manjeet Singh]

Say you are in the technology industry and you recently brought down the time to resolve P1 incidents by 2 hours (from 10 to 8 hours). That's a big accomplishment. Now imagine what you could do if you had Benchmarks. You compare yourself to other technology companies and find out that they are closing P1 incidents in 4 hours. You suddenly realize you have more work to do. The extra time it is taking you is killing your competitive advantage in terms of lost employee productivity and poor customer service, to name a few. So how do you ensure you're always doing as well as, or better than, your peers?

Use Benchmarks to set and achieve performance goals

With ServiceNow ITSM Benchmarks, you can look into performance history trends over the past 6 months. These time-based trend comparisons will help you to see the bigger picture and identify whether your IT performance is moving up or down relative to your peers. Let's look at an example to illustrate how Benchmarks can help you keep up with industry standards (and raise your own).

How to use benchmarks to meet the industry average

In the screenshot above, a customer discovers that the "average time to resolve an incident" has been trending upwards in the last three months. We can also see that the industry average is better than the customer's key performance indicator (KPI). To improve this KPI, the customer used ServiceNow Benchmarks data to set an internal goal of first getting their KPI to be better than the industry average. Subsequent goals would use the new KPI value as the baseline.

How to use benchmarks to keep raising your own standards

Another customer, who is already doing better than the peer average, set a goal to be in the top 25% of the performers in their peer group. Once they reach the top 25%, their next goal is to strive to be in the top 10%.

Now you can take your performance goals and set targets using Performance Analytics. Starting with Jakarta, Benchmarks, and Performance Analytics have are integrated so you can easily drill down from Benchmarks to Performance Analytics scorecards.

In future releases of Benchmarks, you will be able to see the percentile ranking of your performance in the peer distribution to make your goal setting even easier.

Real-time benchmarking makes it easy to identify and refine performance goals

If you have real-time benchmarking at your fingertips, then this type of measurement, comparison, and the process of setting up and refining goals becomes much really simple. When you optimize, you are taking out inefficiencies in support service while lowering the cost and improving your customer satisfaction score.

Want to learn more? Read my other Benchmarks blogs:

• New KPIs and cross platform functionality of Benchmarks in Jakarta
• Use real-time benchmarking to identify gaps and improve service performance
• Got 2 minutes? Why not improve your service delivery KPI performance?
  
• Webinar: Continual Service Improvement with Benchmarks, Surveys, and Assessments in Jakarta