Every time there's an IT incident, there's an impact on IT's resources and on IT's reputation. Service Desk or Help Desk staff get involved, 2nd level support get involved, managers get involved (when there's a big stuff up or there's an escalation) and, no matter how you look at it, the customer is disrupted.

Every incident carries the risk of IT's reputation being eroded and confidence in IT being lost.

Organisations sometimes stumble at the first hurdle with Problem Management, for one of several reasons:

a) Where do we start?
b) Biting of more than they can chew. "This Problem Management book is huge!"
c) Lack of a Problem Management module in their ITSM/Service Desk/CRM toolset.

Now, in an ideal world you would like to have an ITSM toolset in place with an integrated Problem Management module, but, and I must stress this, it is not an absolute pre-requisite.

In Stephen Covey’s ‘7 habits of highly effective people’ he refers to an exhausted man trying ineffectively to saw down a tree. When asked why he doesn’t stop to sharpen his saw, the man replies “I don’t have time to sharpen the saw, I’m too busy sawing!”. In my experience, there are many IT teams out there who are like the man with the blunt saw – they don’t take the time to improve their processes and tools and this leads to staff burn-out and declining IT performance.

These days, an IT department simply delivering the latest shiny new technology is no longer enough. Communicating to set expectations, and then actively working to meet those expectations, is now a critically important part of delivering a good service to IT’s customers. Indeed, it is an important aspect of good customer service in almost any scenario. Think of an example of good service you’ve received in a restaurant or when having your car serviced, and of bad service: setting and meeting expectations may well have played a part.

The Service Desk is the face of IT to the business. This is or should be true in most IT organisations. Its importance to the IT support structure and the perception of the service provided by IT is often made or broken by the impression delivered by the Service Desk from the very first call. Not only are they the key customer facing body, but also, as we all know, “first impressions last”. Traditionally the importance of the Service Desk team, however, has been underestimated, presumably because the critical IT Service Desk Analyst role itself is perceived as a junior role.

As an IT manager, there is one performance improvement discipline that, when done well, will reliably lead to improved service, increased productivity, reduced costs, and improve almost any IT KPI you can think of...

I know that's a pretty big claim, so let's cut to the chase - the discipline is human performance management. The one thing you can do to significantly improve the performance of your IT team is to do a better job of managing the performance of your staff. With nothing but the investment of time, the performance improvement benefits can be huge and here's why:

Sitting on a Melbourne tram recently, I overheard an amusing conversation between two tram drivers. They'd been talking for a while about driving trams, how many years of tram driving experience they'd had, and how it wasn't like the good old days etc, when one of them said:

"I love driving trams. You know, this job would be perfect if it wasn't for the passengers".

When conducting as-is technology assessments to support the development of IT strategies, we frequently find spreadsheets out there in the business, supporting vital business functions but unsupported by IT.

So, when is it appropriate to use Excel and when does it present an unacceptable risk to the organisation? The easiest way to answer this question is to first explain the pros and cons of Excel.

Dave O'Reardon was recently invited to present to the Victorian chapter of the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF). Having led a major IT performance improvement program at an ASX Top 100 company, Dave's presentation, titled "The Biggest Bang for your ITIL Buck", focused on the program initiatives that delivered the most value to IT and the business.

 Click here to view the slides.