Ensuring Project Success: Best practices in Project Delivery
Project delivery is one of the critical services that IT provides. Unfortunately, in the industry, the track record of project delivery for IT is at best a mixed bag. A number of different studies over...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Delivering More by Leveraging the ‘Flow of Work’
As you start out this year as an IT leader and you are trying to meet both project demand on one hand and savings goals on the other, remember to leverage what I term the IT ‘Flow of Work‘. Too often,...
View ArticleWhen to Benchmark and How to Leverage the Results
Benchmarking is an important tool for management and yet frequently I have found most organizations do not take advantage of it. There seem to be three camps when it comes to benchmarking: those who...
View ArticleIT Service Desk: Building a Responsive and Effective Desk
This is the 4th in a series of posts on best practices in the IT Service Desk arena. To catch the previous material, you can check out the first post or you can read through the best practice reference...
View ArticleA Scientific Approach to IT Metrics
In order to achieve a world class or first quartile performance, it is critical to take a ‘scientific’ approach to IT metrics. Many shops remain rooted in ‘craft’ approaches to IT where techniques and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Metrics Roundup: Key Techniques and References
As an IT leader either of a function or of a large IT team with multiple functions, what is the emphasis you should place on metrics and how are you able to leverage them to attain improvement and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Evolving Metrics to Match Your Team’s Maturity
We have covered quite a bit of ground with previous posts on IT metrics but we have some important additions to the topic. The first, that we will cover today, is how to evolve your metrics to match...
View ArticleTying Consumption to Cost: Allocation Best Practices
In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote about the over-exploitation of common resources in an essay titled the “The Tragedy of the Commons“. While Garrett wrote about the overexploitation of common pastureland...
View ArticleUsing Performance Metric Trajectories to Achieve 1st Quartile Performance
I hope you enjoyed the Easter weekend. I have teamed up today with Chris Collins, a senior IT Finance manager and former colleague. Our final post on metrics is on unit costing — on which Chris has...
View ArticleIT Service Desk: Turning around a ‘helpless’ desk
In one of our earliest posts on service desks, I mentioned how an inherited service desk had delivered such poor service that it was referred to by users as the ‘Helpless Desk’ rather than the Help...
View ArticleImproving Vendor Performance
As we discussed in our previous post on the inefficient technology marketplace, the typical IT shop spends 60% or more of its budget on external vendors – buying hardware, software, and services....
View ArticleInfrastructure Engineering – Leveraging a Technology Plan
Our recent post discussed using the Infrastructure Engineering Lifecycle (IELC) to enable organizations to build a modern, efficient and robust technology infrastructure. One of the key expressions...
View Article
