I've seen many ITSM toolset implementation failures. Usually they happen because the buyer wasn't particularly diligent during the evaluation and the decision was made on little more than a vendor's dog and pony show - you know the one, the one where the vendor's slickest salesman shows you all the flashest features of the software, fails to point out its shortcomings, and dazzles you with the all the wonderful stuff that's slated for a yet-to-be-determined future release.

I was talking to some managers of a client of ours recently and we were talking about one of their peers, let’s call him Brian. When I asked why Brian hadn’t done something he said he was going to, everyone in the room laughed. “What’s funny?” I asked. “Oh, what’s funny is that Brian never does what he says he’s going to. He’s a lovely bloke and he has the best intentions, he’s just unreliable”.

Do your projects rely on IT staff who have support responsibilities? Are project deadlines being impacted due to the amount of support work being done?

Do your support staff also have project responsibilities? Are they letting support calls fall into black holes because the project work is more interesting?

As an IT manager, what could be more important than knowing what your customers think of IT?

Enter the traditional customer satisfaction survey. A survey with fifty questions, each one lovingly crafted with the help of a consultant from a local customer satisfaction consultancy. Each year the survey is emailed to IT's customers and, despite the low response rate, the consultant compiles a big fat report with lots of graphs and spider diagrams and references to standard deviations.

Service Catalogues can be very powerful, but can also be a minefield, as you’ll know if you’ve already started down this track.

So, if you are going to implement a Service Catalogue, where do you start?

These days many Service Desk Managers are trying to encourage their cu

Most IT managers are coming to realise that in the 21st century IT needs to focus on providing services. Technology facilitates the provides of IT services, rather than being an end goal in itself. What does this mean for the measurement of the performance of IT departments or external IT service providers?

This is a good question faced by many Service Desk Managers. How do you reduce or clear a backlog when you cannot simply throw more resources at it? It is a challenge I myself have faced.

Here's some approaches that can be mixed and matched as appropriate to your organisation to make a difference.

1. Implement measures and approaches to increase 1st Call Resolution.
a) Set a target/SLA, measure it daily for the month to date and report back to the team.
b) Publicly praise the Analyst(s) resolving the most calls.

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 Ma