It starts with scope discovery, you worry about the big items, like incident, service request, change. You ask if all these modules can be reported on, find out there is some out of the box reports which you assume will be just what you need, and then you never think about it again. Weeks or months go by and now you are in UAT, and your users are bombarding you with emails wanting to know where the reports are, or they are upset because their custom reports they were previously using aren’t there anymore.
What most people don’t realize is that Service Desk Managers use them to measure performance and productivity. The organization uses them to identity processes that may need to be improved on within the Service Desk. Without them, they can’t make necessary business decisions. Sure, they can export saved searches out and spend hours making ad hoc excel reports every month but let’s face it, it’s not exactly productive. Think about it, all that exporting and manipulating in excel takes time, let’s just say for the sake of this example it takes you 3 hours. Now you must do that every month- that’s 36 hours a year of just creating reports each year. You could have budgeted that as part of your implementation and let’s say it took your consultant 8 hours to create that report and get it automated to run and email to the Service Desk Manager. That’s 8 hours, once by a consultant – now that manager gets 36 hours of their year back to focus on their team.
My advice? Get together with your team during the planning phases and have them list out all their reports needed. Then rate them on a need to have/nice to have. Then take the need to have list and compare it to the out of the box list of reports. If the out of the box reports satisfy all your need to haves, then you’re in good shape. If not, you’re going to have to have some reports made. Sometimes some of the out of the box reports just need a little tweaking to meet your needs.
Reports are important too! You need them for performance, productivity, and overall success. How will you ever know if your ITSM tool is successful, and your team is performing well if you can’t report on it?
-Krystina Hodge, Consultant | Project Manager
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