“Establish your goals, monitor your trends, adjust as needed and maturity will be your reward”.

This is the second in a series of articles that provides my thoughts and guidance on what has become my tag line: “Establish your goals, monitor your trends, adjust as needed and maturity will be your reward”.

Monitor your trends – be patient and keep your eyes open!

In my last article I asked you to spend some time doing some research to create a metrics program for your Service Desk, Call Center or Desktop Support team. Hopefully you leveraged as many resources as possible and decided on some industry standard metrics.

The most important task you have is talking with your team to explain what you are tracking and why. Show them the metrics and how they are gathered, explain how some metrics are calculated and the calculation used to gather the data. You can’t mature your organization in a vacuum, you must involve every member of the team.  

The second task you have is to create a spreadsheet that contains daily, weekly and monthly tabs. This spreadsheet will grow over time and will become your data source for all your metric data.

Now you need to be patient and keep a close eye on those metrics.   It will take some time for the trends to reveal themselves to you and your team. While you are waiting I recommend the following:

·        Update your KPI data on a regular basis - I recommend daily.

·        Build some graphs that provide a visual indication of how effective your metrics program is working.

·        Keep a close eye on your Customer Satisfaction – at the end of the day it’s why you exist

·        Listen to feedback from everyone especially your team – remember your technicians are on the front lines and have direct touch on the pulse of the daily beat

·        Recognize there will anomalies – major incidents, rollouts, etc., these will impact your trending

·        Share the data with anyone and everyone – share it to the point where others can explain what you are trying to achieve

Patience is the key to monitoring, you need to gather enough data to establish a solid trend. Remember the data will provide the guidance, whether good or bad. The trends will tell you the direction you are heading. 

Once you have established a distinct trend, you are ready for the next step in the process. We will talk about Adjust As Needed in my next article.