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Matti Grönroos
Reporting - Quantity or Quality?
But what is a report? Is it those two or three figures expected by the top management, or is it an Excel table printed onto a five centimeters thick pile of paper?
The scope and depth of reporting has its business impacts. Even if the low-level systems can produce more figures than there is ink in the world to print them, the figures must be structured and analyzed before they are useful.
Even reporting needs its own policy and rules!
Although the reporting itself takes place in the operations phase of the services, its business case is mainly created in the planning phase. The planning includes agreeing on the scope, audience, table of contents, confidentiality, etc.
Reporting is the most important regular input for Service Level Management.
Because the Service Level Management is a bridge builder between IT and business, the regular reports cannot be full of technology jargon. Creating an appropriate report is a time-consuming task and therefore the business case of excessive reporting can easily turn negative.
When planning the content and scope of the reporting, it is worth considering a few questions:
- What
- Why
- How
- To whom
- When
- How much
- Policy and procedure to create additional ad-hoc reports
The last point might be critical. Businesses easily tend to have extra or customized reporting, especially if they can get it for free. As the extra reporting usually needs extra effort, it may be wise to manage such requests by internal charging or just saying no.
The S-curve usually applies to the scope of reporting. Reaching the minimum viable level needs a lot of effort. It is wise to avoid traveling to the other end of the curve. A big additional effort may produce a minimal added value only. Better to keep at the steep part of the curve.
For the "what" question, you should offer a limited number of things to report, because excessive reporting can easily lead to losing the forest for the trees. The possibility to create Ad Hoc reports shall of course be maintained, because they are needed in resolving exceptional situations.
Often, the indicators reported in the service level reports are divided into two categories:
- SLA Metrics, being binding or guiding targets listed in the Service Level Agreement and reviewed at each regular follow-up meeting.
- KPI Metrics, being supplementary information and may be partly internal information to the service provider. Well-prepared KPI measures can be used as input for the Balanced Scorecard thinking. KPI indicators can be added and deleted as situations change.