Customer Reviews

Measuring ITIL: Measuring, Reporting and Modeling - the IT Service Management Metrics That Matter Most to IT Senior Executives

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Folks,
After you have suffered sitting through the courses on the philosohy of ITIL, buy this book, "Measuring ITIL", and also purchase "Visible OPS". These two books will give you a practicum on implementing ITIL for your infrastructure operations. And yes, your IT infrastructure operations will improve as a result!

This text presents the components of evaluating your IT Organization with clear and concise terms and offers a practical terms and approach. It is a quick read but extremely informative. It's fully aligned with ITIL but cuts through much of the complexity to provide a clear path for implementing a metrics program.

I highly recommend this book to senior management, the program manager and his/her team and the participants from within the organization that will be charged with identifying Key Performance Indicators and Critical Success factors for their areas of the business.

Short book that has a quick (1 hour) read. Practical to follow, but short on depth. Get if you want to quickly implement reporting but do not expect details on actual implementation.

Wouldn't it be nice if you knew what you desired to measure and analyze prior to rolling out new ITSM processes or their enabling tools? What if you have no former point of reference or an entire lack of metrics? You could start from scratch or use this book as a starting point and modify accordingly. The later option will provide more time for determining how best to capture, disseminate, report and conduct trending - which is what you really care about anyways...

Don't expect a silver bullet. This book (more like a booklet) provides generic quality metrics spanning the data, operational and service perspectives. It is short and concise using mostly tables and lists and draws upon many of the KPIs included within the ITIL core texts. It's a great way to save time and get diverse IT folks operating from a common reference but like all successful metric initiatives, customization and targeted efforts will still be necessary. It also includes a decent excel dashboard to get you rolling.

As a previous reviewer mentioned, it is best when paired with other texts for a more comprehensive presentation of metrics theory, challenges, benefits and techniques. I too would recommend "Visible Ops" and add to that list "Metrics for IT Service Management" by Peter Brooks. Each book promotes a different perspective and breadth but together they cover all the bases particularly well.

Any book like this is going to be difficult. This particular book is intended for the absolutely novice to ITIL or ITSM in general. For those not used to using metrics, it presents a useful overview of what to collect, and what value that information may be (and all kudos to the author, they include things beyond the normal Incident, Change, Problem Management that appears to occupy 80% of similar texts).

For those who have used metrics to manage business units before, it is probably a little light to be useful.

My view if you are new to ITSM and trying to pick it up in a hurry, this might be useful. You can read the 150 odd pages in less than and a couple of hours (and there is quite a bit of repetition) so it is not a huge investment in time.

If you have much of a background in IT / IS Management, there probably isn't really much to keep you enthralled here. Still, I expect it will be a useful thing to have in the library so I can pass it around no IT business colleagues to get them thinking.

I too agree with previous reviewers of this book. Unlike many ITIL books, you are quickly given Key Performance Indicators and Critical Success Factors that you and your team members can use and build on.

I found that the included ITSM Metrics Model spreadsheet tool to be of some use. I was very surprised and disappointed that it can't be built upon/extended since the write permissions have been locked.

However, I didn't find the included DICE model spreadsheet tool very useful for our needs since it is very basic.

If you get nothing else out of this book, the author clearly tells you how to create KPIs, CSFs, Tolerances, and metrics that matter.

Because of this, I've earned a lot of points with my boss and executives for just for purchasing this book and for trying to apply/create better metrics for our executives and a metrics program for our department.

Don Neizer
Change/Configuration Manager

If your goal is not to lecture on, but to implement a sound ITSM measurement framework quickly and efficiently, put aside all other books currently available on the subject, until you buy and read this book! When you open Measuring ITIL, you will not only find excellent advice on how to begin implementing ITSM measurement and reporting right away, but you will also discover a CD containing customizable ready-to-use Microsoft Excel version of ITSM Measurement Model, a simple yet very comprehensive implementation of the metrics and calculations discussed in the book. I highly recommend this book!

I found this book very interesting and I highly recommend it for Lean Six Sigma practitioners who work on IT teams or, are involved in IT integration within their process workflows. It provides useful measures (metrics) which describe the performance of information technology systems. The metrics are divided into categories which include operations, key performance indicators, tolerances, critical success factors, dashboards and outcomes. This extensive metric listing is also integrated into a DICE model at the end of the book. DICE is an acronym representing project duration, integrity, commitment and effort. These elements form the basis of a project success prediction score. The DICE model was published in the Harvard Business Review in the article, title, The Hard Side of Change Management. It was authored by Harold L. Sirkin, Perry Keenan and Alan Jackson (Reprint R0510G).

I wanted some specific examples and that is what I got. The CD was great because it had all of the examples used in the book already all typed up.

Randy Stienberg gets to the heart of the measurement and metrics very quickly with practical lists.
I found the information to be an instant hit with my customer management and my team.

-Arun