Tracking and trending - ITIL Tutorial

- [Instructor] Wouldn't it be nice if we could see around corners? Imagine being able to put this skill to work, how much faster would you be able to move? How much more confidence would you have in your step? Let's discuss problem identification and specifically methods for tracking and trending so we can try to perform this task. They say you're only as capable of action as the data you review. If you're not actively reviewing your data, you're at the mercy of the opinions and people around you, and you'll always end up being reactionary in your role. To be really successful at problem management requires that you brush up on your data analysis skills and start digging. Key places to start include case history of customer complaints, feedback about incidents, observational studies and even charts. I like to usually start with creating some charts. Charts can help me visualize and tell a story so that I can help understand the current environment around me, specifically what's happening, how often, and to whom. I can then play dress up and put on my continuous improvement hat, using this data to guide my decisions and prioritize where I spend my energy. A key question I get clients to ask themselves is that if they were king or queen for a day, what would they change so that users would have a smoother experience with their services? Using this thought exercise can really help focus data and turn it into action. After my clients start thinking like a monarch, I tell them to act like it and start asking for executive summaries of complex data. After all, the Pareto all principle states that 80% of your issues and noise are actually coming from only 20% of your environment. So let's find a way to break data down so that this information is in more manageable chunks. The way we can do this is you can start asking questions such as what products are generating the most noise? What types of hardware or equipment are responsible? What are the most repeated calls about? And which of these types of tickets or fires creates the most cost for our organization? Which labor shift gets the most volume? And what concerns do our suppliers and vendors have? I know this is a lot of questions, but nobody said being a king or queen was easy. These questions really will help you focus and get the right data in front of you. It's all about going on a hunt. If you're thinking right now, Shane, I don't have time for this kind of Safari. I would argue back that going on a data Safari is like taking vacation. You simply need to schedule them and take them. Otherwise, you'll forever be telling yourself that now's not a good time, the team really needs me or I have too much on my plate to go on vacation. Neglecting a data Safari is also similar to neglecting a vacation. It's going to leave you in poor health, low energy, and with inability to focus. Unlike skipped vacations, you're not the victim. Your organization, however, will be. Other key activities in problem identification includes searching for duplicate issues or sometimes often repeated issues that have to continually be resolved by different engineers. These types of issues are great opportunities for improvement as they save a lot of team time and labor hours. Sometimes tracking and trending data may be unavailable. In these special cases, you may have to go covert and spend time silently attending an auditing incident bridge calls. During your audit, map out the call against key performance indicators. Measure things like flow, speed, number of individuals in attendance, amount of silence, and especially progress over time. Pay particular attention and make note of both good and bad critical thinking behaviors. A helpful visualization tip can be to graph these calls in a time versus process step chart. So you can see what step of the process the team was working on or what type of questioning behaviors or tools were being used at what point in the incident life cycle. Once you complete enough audits, you'll begin to spot trends and then you can plan to improve performance for key areas you identify. It's a tough job and you'll have to get your hands wrapped around some tools to really supercharge your performance but it's absolutely worth it. I recommend building additional skill in tools like Excel, Power BI, Tableau, and MATLAB. Learning a data analysis language like R, Python and SQL really help as well. It's especially important to practice how to retrieve and group data quickly and efficiently and these skills will last you a lifetime. So LinkedIn Learning is a fantastic resource for all of this. I highly suggest you check out some of the other videos available.