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.

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.

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.