Management reports generation

Service Manager includes two options for generating management reports using key performance indicators: Service Manager Dashboard queries and charts, Reporting, and Service Manager Crystal Reports. These tools allow you to generate predefined and ad hoc reports to display any information. The following describes these tools.

Service Manager Reports

The Service Manager Reports module provides reports and dashboards to enable faster analysis and improved time to resolution. These reports organize data into various chart formats, and the dashboards display one or more reports to provide global information about critical activities or metrics. These reports display relationships among categories of data. For example, one report might display the number of incidents per customer, while another displays the number of incidents by priority. Viewing these reports together as a dashboard enables you to make better business decisions, such as assigning resources to close incidents. Report Managers can share a report or dashboard.

The Service Manager Reports module aims to provide a lightweight reporting feature for active operational data, and the reports are therefore designed to retrieve, represent and visualize up to 100,000 active records out of millions. To define analytical reports against the entire data set, you need to use a third-party business intelligence tool.

Service Manager Crystal Reports

For operational reporting or regularly scheduled reporting requirements, an OEM version of Crystal Reports is provided with Service Manager. We also deliver over 40 predefined reports. You can run reports on an ad hoc basis and system administrators can define an automatic report-generation schedule using the Service Manager Report Scheduler tool. Crystal Reports 2008 is required to view, generate, or modify these reports and is included with Service Manager.

Service Manager ships with the following predefined reports:

• Request Management Reports

  • Request Aging Report

• Service Desk Reports

  • Escalated Interactions

  • First Time Fixed Interactions

  • Interactions Closed in a Given Year

  • Interactions Resulting in Related Issues

  • Number of Service Desk Requests by Department

  • Service Desk Interactions Opened and Closed

  • Top 20 Operators by Average Interaction Time in Last 90 Days

• Change Management Reports

  • Changes Closed Meeting SLM Target

  • Changes Scheduled for This Week

  • Changes Opened and Closed

  • Percentage of Emergency Changes

  • Percentage of Rejected Changes

  • Percentage of Successful Changes

• Configuration Management Reports

  • CI Relationships

  • CI Summary

  • Percentage of CIs Related to Other CIs

• Incident Management Reports

  • Backlog of Incidents

  • Incidents Opened and Closed

  • Incident Aging Report

  • Incident Reassignment Analysis

  • Incidents by Assignment and Priority

  • Incidents Closed Meeting SLA Target

  • Open and Closed Incidents by Service

  • Open Incidents Monthly Analysis by Category

  • Percentage of Incidents by Priority

  • Reopened Incidents

• Knowledge Management Reports

  • Knowledge Management Activity

  • Knowledge Management Demand

  • Knowledge Management Summary

  • Knowledge Management Usage by Department

  • Self-Service Escalated Knowledge Management Search Escalation

  • Self-Service Knowledge Management Search History

• Problem Management Reports

  • Average Time to Diagnose

  • Open and Closed Problems by Service

  • Problems Opened and Closed

  • Problems Closed Meeting SLA Target

• Service Level Management Reports

  • Service Level Management Availability Duration Metrics

  • Service Level Management Availability Uptime Metrics

  • Service Level Management Response Metrics

  • Service Level Management Summary

In addition, you can perform a search within each module using different combinations of conditions, and the search results can be presented in list or chart.

You can also create your own management reports using Crystal Report and build your reports on any field in the database.

Change management reports

Service Manager provides out-of-box Crystal Reports for Change Management that includes the following reports:

• Changes Closed Meeting SLM Target
• Changes Scheduled for This Week
• Changes Opened and Closed
• Percentage of Emergency Changes
• Percentage of Rejected Changes
• Percentage of Successful Changes

In addition, the Service Manager user can search all change records using any combination of search conditions. The search results can be presented as a table or a chart.

Change Management reporting using Micro Focus IT Executive Scorecard

Companies can also use the Micro Focus IT Executive Scorecard for comprehensive management reporting. The IT Executive Scorecard is a key element in the Micro Focus IT Performance Suite and is a systematic approach to digitizing the sensing, measuring, and instrumentation of the entire IT-controlled landscape into single consolidated views for IT leaders and practitioners. The IT Performance Suite includes comprehensive families of proven software for strategy, planning, and governance, application lifecycle management, IT operations, information management, security intelligence, and risk management. These solutions are unified by one of the most complete IT data models for collecting and relating data feeds from individual products.

What makes the IT Performance Suite much more than just a collection of management software is the Executive Scorecard—a single pane of glass that pulls all the information and analysis together. In short, IT Executive Scorecard can help track performance and communicate in business terms.

The IT Executive Scorecard allows companies to:

• Use a single pane of glass to view IT business services, programs, and financial status
• View performance and problem areas promptly
• Show historical data to highlight improvements and identify negative trends early
• Automate and decrease effort required for the data-gathering process to enable real-time reporting
• Cascade key performance indicators (KPI) across layers of scorecards
• Collaborate by adding annotations to KPIs and objectives
• Access the information from a desktop, tablet, or smartphone
• Add notes using collaboration in the context of a KPI or objective

With its balanced scorecard, best-practice dashboards, and over 135 key performance indicators already defined, the IT Executive Scorecard is a unique differentiator. The IT Executive Scorecard is an analytical product that renders performance from a broad range of data sources, including (not limited) Micro Focus Business Service Management, Micro Focus Service Manager, Micro Focus Asset Manager, and Micro Focus Project and Portfolio Management.

From a business point of view, the need to control information technology (IT) is driving a new level of maturity in performance management. Many organizations turn to executive scorecards to help drive performance and more are now pouring this approach into the context of IT. The out-of-the-box Scorecards in the IT Executive Scorecard are based around up to four high-level perspectives. These equate to high-level goals of IT or the business. The four used in IT Executive Scorecard are: IT Value, Customer, Operational Excellence, and Future Orientation.

The scoring of those objectives is based on one or more KPIs. In this way, the persona can gain a quick view of overall performance in an area of interest and drill down further if required into the KPI or KPIs that are responsible for the performance score.

KPIs reflect how well the organization is doing in areas that most impact financial measures valued by shareholders, such as profitability and revenues.

A KPI evaluates the performance according to expectations. The context is provided using:

• Thresholds. Upper and lower ranges of acceptable performance.
• Targets. Predefined gains, such as 10 percent new customers per quarter.
• Benchmarks. Based on industry wide measures or various methodologies, such as Six Sigma.
• Trend. The direction of the performance of the KPI, either Up,Down, or Static.

A KPI is a Metric, but a Metric is not always a KPI. The key difference is that KPIs always reflect strategic value drivers whereas Metrics represent the measurement of any business activity. Metrics always show a number that reflects performance. KPIs put that performance in context. Metrics are not matched against a threshold. An example of a metric could be an MTTR (mean time to recover) which measures the average time between the occurrence of a set of incidents and their resolution. An example of a KPI could be an MTTR, which measures the average time between the occurrence of a set of incidents and their resolution, compared to a defined threshold. For example: ‘MTTR less than one hour’.

The out-of-box KPIs can be altered to suit different personas or augmented by new KPIs created within IT Executive Scorecard.

Out-of-Box KPIs for Service Manager

Executive Scorecard has a number of KPIs to support Change Management from a Scorecard Level.

• % of Changes Resulting in Outage
• % of Emergency Changes
• % of Unauthorized Implemented Changes
• % of Unplanned Changes
• Approved vs Rejected Changes
• Automated Change Implementation Rate
• Automated Change Implementation Success Rate
• Change Backlog Size
• Change Success Rate
• Number of Completed Changes

The out-of-box KPIs can be altered to suit different personas or augmented by new KPIs created within IT Executive Scorecard.

 

Related topic

Service Manager Reports introduction