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. In this episode, we're going to be talking about service management status reporting and the importance of visualization. This month, I'm joined by a special guest who I'll let introduce themselves.

Hi everyone, I'm Dan TS. I am a solution architect here at Appfire. Right, so first of all, service management status reporting—what is it really? Anyone who's involved in service management will know that one of the things you're always asked to do is to produce reports and dashboards. What sort of reports have you seen then?

Anything really. A lot of what I was doing when I worked in a retail business was just a big service dashboard of all the services they had. They were a food retailer, so any kind of deliveries going in and out of the warehouses had to be monitored. It was really interesting but it was a lot of green and red lights at any one time.

Yes, indeed. You're quite right; it can vary. I've seen businesses with war rooms that have lots of screens with charts and flashing lights, and then I've seen other teams that just do the basics. Typical status reports that service management teams are interested in include ticket volume, current ticket status, service status, and service outages. It can also include financial data, especially if you're running a service desk that provides a paid service. You need to track costs and revenue. We'll probably touch on risks later, as visualizing risks can be quite tricky. One of my favorite areas is experience management, like XLAs, CSAT, and NPS.

I thought the best thing to do is to talk about some of our experiences. You mentioned one there; do you have a good example?

Yeah, one of the big challenges I had was bringing in data and centralizing it. That's challenge number one: how do we get the right data and who needs to see it? Then, how do you interpret that data to be efficient and productive? For example, if your ticket volumes for incidents have gone up tenfold, obviously there's an issue, but what does that actually mean? Is it because one of your services is failing, or are you not dealing with incidents as quickly as you thought? What is the root cause of that?

The million-dollar question I often get asked by customers is, 'What should we report on?'

Absolutely. The answer is usually whatever's important to your KPIs. Depending on what you're trying to deliver as a service team, you really want to understand how effective or efficient you are in delivering that service.

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Reporting is probably the most popular third-party app. Outside of Atlassian, there are powerful dashboarding tools like Tableau and Power BI. The good thing is that these tools work with most service management tools, including JSM. You mentioned one interesting tool; I wanted to mention your risk management app, which we're big fans of. Can you give a bit of background on that and why that visualization is useful?

Absolutely. Hedge is a risk management app. One thing I will say is it's cloud-only, just for those still on DC. The risk management app allows you to take in all that data, no matter what it is. If you have risk as an issue type or mitigations, you can visualize it with color. Humans are far more visual than we are readable. A picture tells a thousand words. By visualizing risks, you can easily identify which ones need focus based on their severity.