Planning and evaluation model - ITIL Tutorial

- Measurements and metrics must align with higher level requirements including your organization's vision and mission, if they're going to be used effectively to drive decision-making and improvement. In this lesson, we're going to focus on the planning and evaluation model. Now simply put for any organization to make good decisions, it's really important that they measure the right things. To ensure you're measuring the right things, you need to connect what is being measured with the organization's desired outcomes and purpose. Now the planning and evaluation model is a simple model to help you create these connections when you're developing your metrics. As you can see, we define our metrics downward from purpose to objectives, to indicators, to metrics. And then we evaluate our organization. We start going from the bottom up and collecting those metrics, analyzing them into indicators, combining various indicators to see how they're doing in terms of our objectives. And then looking across all our objectives to see our overall purpose. Now, in this diagram on the screen we've simplified this into a single line, just like they did in your idol textbook. But we can more completely draw this out, if we did it like this, because there's multiple metrics that feed upward into a single indicator. And multiple indicators can feed upward into a single objective. And finally, multiple objectives can feed from across the different departments and functions in an organization all up towards a common organizational purpose. Now, when we start from the top we work our way downward, we begin with our purpose. The purpose asked the question, what are we doing this for? This is where the core mission is articulated. Everything needed to achieve and validate the mission can be determined from this high level purpose. Then with our purpose confirmed, we can consider our objectives. Objectives are going to ask, what would a successful result look like? And what are the characteristics of success? These objectives are used to define what should be achieved or created in order for us to ensure that the desired purpose is going to be fulfilled. These objectives are going to refine the purpose into specifics for us and there are often going to be numerous objectives associate with a single purpose. Each of the results of the actions associated with these objectives should be measured as well. Next, we have the indicators. This ask what measurable results would indicate success for us and how many different indicators are needed for effective evaluation of this objective. Now, in my diagram, I showed only two indicators per objective. But there can be one indicator for an objective, or many, many more. In one organization I worked at, they used almost 25 different indicators for a single objective in one of their core services. Now I personally argue that that is way too many, but the point here is there is no fixed amount that is considered correct. You can have a single one, if that's what you decide right looks like, or you can have many of them. It really depends what your organization thinks the correct answer is. But like I said, for simplicity sake, I have shown just to per objective in this diagram. Now, when it comes to indicators, the only rule is that you have to have at least one indicator for each objective that you have listed. After all we have to have some way for us to measure success for each objective, right? Now this is going to bring us down to our metrics at the bottom. What are the numbers? How many for each given unit of time is there? What percentage of items is being recorded? How long did something take for us to do? All of these are the types of questions that we're dealing with when we're talking about metrics. Metrics are going to be used to collect data for later evaluation and assessment against our given indicators. Now just like we need one or more indicator per objective, we have to have at least one or more metric for each indicator. Now, the interesting thing though about metrics, is that you can have a metric that isn't tied to any indicators. There are probably thousands of numbers inside your business or organization but not all of them are collected or analyzed. For example in my business, we have the number of minutes watched by students in our courses across all of our platforms. Last month we had over 3 million minutes watched by our students. Just in the last 30 days. Now that's over 50,000 hours of content, over 2,083 days, almost six years worth of time that our students watched our videos all in the last month. Now that is a really large number and it makes us feel really good. But this metric, while it's interesting, it really doesn't drive any decisions within our company. And so it isn't tied to an indicator, an objective or a purpose. It's just something that sounds really good. We had over 3 million minutes watched in the last 30 days. But again, it doesn't really drive business decisions. So it's really a useless metric. So what are some best practices for designing your metrics, your indicators and your objectives based on your organization's purpose? Well, I like to start out with three things by considering our guiding principles from our idle four foundation course. First progress iteratively and with feedback. We want to start with the largest purpose of the organization and then we want to break it down into the purpose of each project, practice, service, or team that's going to support that larger purpose. This way of nesting things and aligning things is going to be really helpful for us. By continually iterating this purpose, we're going to help find the right one for our particular area of the organization and make it a manageable size. Here we can collect feedback and if we don't think we got it a hundred percent right, that's okay. We can always iterate and try again. Second, we want to think and work holistically. For each of our objectives, we want to consider which metrics we can collect across the organization to properly indicate success. It's unlikely that you have any single metric that is sufficient on its own to indicate success or failure of your organization. So you really have to think holistically here. Just because you work in IT, doesn't mean that you can't pull a metric from finance or from sales or something like that, that all can help inside your organization as well. And third, we want to keep it simple and practical. While you may be tempted to collect measurements on everything out there, over measuring is a waste of time and resources, and it can really take you off track. In the end over measuring is just as bad as under measuring. So you need to keep it simple and narrow your focus down to the truly meaningful metrics for your organizational decision making. Like I said, that 3 million minutes metric, we wouldn't spend time or money collecting it but the system automatically calculates it for us as part of our learning management system. So it's just an interesting metric we have. But if we had to actually go forth and spend money and time to collect it, we wouldn't bother because it doesn't help us in our business.