Project: Performance Reporting Metrics Automation

Situation

Although the reporting improvement project was a success, I wanted to cut even more wasted time and introduce more efficiency. 

The current improved manual reporting took one individual 3 weeks to complete. To be in compliance with ISO:27001, this has to be done on a monthly basis; not leaving much time to do much else.

Task

I needed to research different options to automate reporting for incident, change, and request coming from over seven different ITSM applications. I need to also ensure that there is a separation between the five different service areas: Network Security, Security Operations, User Account Administration, Information Security Management, and Service Assurance.

Action

After researching, I worked with the Services Business Intelligence and Integration teams on putting together the project charter. The plan was to bring the data from seven different application suites, normalize it based on pre-determined templates, and produce near real-time performance reporting metrics. Utilizing Agile Management methodologies and SDLC, we began building out data collection from all the applications, reporting for the three different ITIL processes, and the user interface.

Due to C6 and ITAR restrictions, we were unable to directly integrate with some customer-owned applications. I was still able to access this manually, using Remote Desktop Connection and CSV files we came up with a process to take care of this. At the first of the month, I would take a day to manually download the necessary data and deliver to the integration tool. The tool would then normalize the data in the CSV files and deliver it to the Business Intelligence database. From there, the reporting tool will utilize the combined data to produce the necessary reporting metrics.

Results

At the end of a 12-month project, there was a massive improvement in the metrics and efficiency. This monthly process now only took one person three days to deliver, cutting wasted time by over 80%. This produced actionable metrics for Incident, Request, and Change Management for operational and SLA/KPI items. Any callouts or abnormalities were documented and delivered to the necessary managers prior to the now 30-minute monthly meeting—a reduction of 50%. Items were typically addressed via email prior to the meeting.

This was another huge win for Service Management, freeing up almost the entire month to work on service delivery improvements, standardizations, and weekly reporting efforts.