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.

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.