The good news is that service desks can generate a great deal of data for ITSM reporting. The bad news is that without clarity and a vision, you could miss the opportunity to communicate valuable insights. Cireson recently released a few new Add-Ins that help you drill down and visualize Microsoft System Center Service Manager (SCSM) data more effectively. In this blog, we’ll step back and cover best practices to support your overall reporting process with the help of specific Add-Ins.
There are a few things you can do to make sure your ITSM reporting is easily understood and actionable.
5 Ways to Produce More Specific ITSM Reporting
1. Decide Up Front What You Will Track: Focus on Defined Goals.
You might have the ability to run comprehensive reports in SCSM, but excessive data is difficult to interpret. It’s very easy to overlook important points when the data is too broad. The best way to make sure this doesn’t happen is to focus on what is tangible: department and organization goals and KPIs. Extracting data that supports or relates to specific goals will make your reports more useful to stakeholders, so decide ahead of time which goals you will focus on and how they can be measured.
2. Find The Angle or Perspective: How Will You Tell the Story?
You could report on what happened during a certain time frame. But is that useful? Once you decide what goals to report on, consider how it will be laid out. You want to arrange the data in a way that immediately speaks to information that stakeholders value. We’ll elaborate on this in the next section.
3. Take Advantage of Tools that Simplify Customization.
Every company is different. Information that leaders are focused on may vary or change over time. Out-of-the-box reporting features aren’t able to get as granular as you will likely need, but you can use a few specific tools to customize without a great deal of effort.
Cireson Page Filter Widget Add-Ins
Custom dashboards may give you specific data, but you may have to create and manage multiple custom dashboards (for each support group or region, for example) and assimilate the data into one big picture. It’s time consuming. An easier way is to use Cireson’s new Page Filter Widget Add-In for Service Manager Portal (SMP) to establish a single custom dashboard page with options to drill down according to criteria that you define. It’s an efficient way to extract and display data, particularly for multiple stakeholders.
Cireson’s Widget Framework: Define Widgets for a Custom Dashboard
Even if you have isolated the data you want to display, you may still need the flexibility to illustrate it effectively. You can use Cireson’s widget framework to define widgets in SMP for a custom dashboard with flexible visuals.
4. Provide Access to Tailored Reports
Here’s the tricky thing: even if you’ve prepared a goal-focused report, it might not convey data that each stakeholder wants to see. That’s where Cireson’s Page Filter Add-In can be particularly helpful. It allows you to place multiple configurable widgets on a single page so that a cross section of data can be seen in one view. Not only is report generation faster, but tailored slices of data can also be visualized in each widget. An example of this would be the charts for the Application Support Group and Desktop Data Support Group in our Page Filter Add-In blog.
5. Review Reports Regularly
One thing that’s likely to remain constant: there will be continued change in your organization’s industry, business goals and processes used to achieve goals. It’s a good idea to review your reporting methods to make sure the information you share is relevant and useful.
Cireson SMP Add-Ins can help you with reporting and much more! Check out our Add-Ins blog series to see how they simplify IT service management tasks and ITSM reporting.
Catch up on Add-Ins:
