12 ways to measure KPI for IT teams
Planning is the key to the success of any project. Nothing is more important than preparing the right strategy and completing the milestones one by one. Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of teams fail to deliver results as the consequence of poor planning.
According to the report, the lack of clear purpose and goals is the single most frequent reason teams fail to fulfill their duties. It’s the same with all niches and industries, including the IT branch, which makes it critical to establish precise metrics to measure progress.
In this post, we will show you 12 ways to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) for your full-time IT support. Let’s take a look!
Measuring IT results
John Simmons, a senior IT manager at UK Best Essays, says there are four fundamental ways to track the progress of an IT project: “You can analyze financial indicators, employee engagement, and the satisfaction of end users, but most companies still put the biggest emphasis on concrete results and deliverables.”
How can you do this? Well, there are several solutions:
Project delivery time
This KPI is very clear and obvious. You make a deal with your IT partners to complete the project within the reasonable period (days, weeks, months) and then you follow the calendar. If they complete all duties promptly, you can say it’s a success. But if not, you will be facing additional costs and setbacks.
Quality assurance
Timely delivery is good only if the IT staff can guarantee quality performance. However, a lot of projects end up in a mess due to the variety of functionality problems, so IT units need to go through it all over again. Quality assurance is one of the safest KPIs because you measure results based on the overall number of bugs and issues.
Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
SLA is a contract between a service provider and the end user that defines the level of service expected from the service provider. The model describes all project-related details, including delivery time, accountability, milestones, and consequences. Most IT organizations don’t prefer this approach, but it’s definitely one of the safest ways to ensure quality performance.
Analyze agility
This KPI is not as tangible as the previous three, but it plays a major role on some occasions. Namely, some projects require frequent changes and IT professionals have to be agile enough to respond promptly. In such circumstances, their will and determination to act quickly can be a decisive factor that makes or breaks the entire project.
Measuring financial results
It’s not difficult to conduct high-quality projects if you can afford to hire the best IT experts and get state of the art tools. But most companies can’t do that, which highlight the importance of financial metrics. Here are a few ways to deal with this issue:
Follow the budget
The first solution is rather simple – all you need to do is keep an eye on expenses to avoid overspending in any phase of the implementation. Doing so, you will ensure quality performance over the course of the entire project.
Chargeback
IT chargeback is an accounting strategy that applies the costs of IT services, hardware or software to the business unit in which they are used. That way, all units within the company get to meet the real value of IT services, while each one can measure and pay for their usage proportionally. This is a convenient way to see which department requires a lot of IT attention and also the method to detect pain points and reduce costs where possible.
Application and service of total cost
If you want to get an in-depth IT service costs, this might be the most convenient KPI model for you. It gives you the opportunity to figure out IT-related expenses on a granular level, so you can see how much you spend on different types of services such as hardware and software maintenance, security, or data processing. Once you understand how it all works, you can decide to eliminate less relevant items and reduce certain costs in the long run.
Supplemental financial KPIs
Supplemental KPIs fall under the “miscellaneous” category because they include all other financial parameters that can measure the performance of IT teams. It can be anything related to IT work, from staffing numbers to software costs. For instance, you can compare the price of cloud software versus the on-premise software to see which one fits your budget and professional requirements more adequately.
Measuring end users’ inputs
IT platforms don’t function separately or independently. On the contrary, all members of the company or even your clients use IT solutions at least to some extent, which means you can also measure their inputs. There are two important KPIs to check out in this field:
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Customer satisfaction depends largely on the performance and usability of your IT solutions, so you can use NPS to calculate its efficiency. By definition, NPS is an index that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others, but you can use it to analyze brand advocacy from the tech point of view. It can drastically improve your customer service and give a new boost to the business if handled correctly.
Service desk performance
The service desk is one of the crucial customer relationship drivers so that can serve as another IT input for your organization. The service desk KPI includes things like ticket issuing processes, POS inquiries, and queuing procedures.
Measuring employee performance
Although most people consider IT professionals to be lone wolves who don’t communicate with end users, the truth is they need to be in touch with their clients 24/7. That’s why we can measure employee performance as well:
Employee engagement
Some projects are complex and challenging, giving IT experts enough reason to engage and prove professional capabilities. Most of the time, however, IT work is repetitive and boring. For this reason, you need to measure employee engagement to avoid lower performance rates and customer dissatisfaction.
Team initiative
One more way to judge IT teams is to see how often they propose fresh ideas and suggest new initiatives that can improve your business.
Conclusion
Following the performance of your IT unit is not easy, but it’s necessary if you want to maintain the highest level of functionality. In this post, we showed you 12 ways to measure KPIs for IT teams. Don’t hesitate to use them – it will make your IT staff better and more productive.
Warren is a marketing enthusiast and a blogger at UK Best Essays, who loves music. If he doesn’t have a guitar in his hands, he’s probably embracing new technologies and marketing techniques online! You can meet him on Twitter and Facebook.
