An Overview of IT KPIs
IT KPIs are measurable values used by IT Teams to track and determine their progress on specific business objectives. These KPIs help determine how well IT Teams are performing. Whether it’s an internal or external IT team, there is no doubt of the mounting pressure that these teams experience as organizations rely on them more and more.
Quite often we see entire businesses halt operations because of security breaches, viral attacks, or core system shutdowns.
IT teams also create huge value, without which modern business can’t move forward, but often with a significant price tag. So, we thought IT Teams would be a good addition to our KPI examples series.
There is a wide range of IT KPIs that can be measured, but for this piece, we have focused on three areas and collected a suite of 12 IT KPI examples for you to use as a reference.
Check out our FREE IT Strategy Template to put your own IT KPIs into action or we also have an IT KPI Cheat Sheet, this free resource will enable you to visualize your KPIs in relation to your overall business strategy.
IT KPI Examples
IT KPIs for Measuring Process and Solutions
The IT departments are often measured by the solutions they provide and how effectively they tackle challenges for an organization. So it makes a lot sense to outline some process and solution driven KPIs.
Project Delivery Time
This is one of the KPIs that IT teams often get measured on by the wider business: Did they deliver what they promised on time?
It is relatively easy to measure if you are managing projects with timelines and clear targets (weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly). Slight delays in any process in the organization are likely to cost you time in the end.
Quality Assurance
One thing is to deliver a project on time, but if it is riddled with issues and bugs, this means very little.
Therefore, measuring the number of issues per project and as a whole, can help determine where there may be challenges when launching projects, and with time, this will improve the process and reduce friction.
Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
This is quite a specific way to measure and present both performance (time) and quality. The numbers are agreed upon and measured monthly or quarterly to identify if the agreed level of service is being delivered.
Consequently, SLAs often get a bad rap because they often show an IT team is not as good as hoped, but on the flip side, they can present transparency and set realistic expectations if used positively.
Measuring Agility
This looks at how quickly and effectively your IT team can react to change in the needs of an organization. This can include the ability to scale processes and also being able to pivot on projects without impacting time or budgets significantly.
Your IT team can run, as usual, grow, or transform, and measuring how adaptable you are will help you to understand how well-positioned you are to achieve your potential.
IT KPIs For Measuring Financial Metrics
By measuring monetary metrics in IT, teams and leaders can steer technology expenditures and investments.
Moreover, they can do this in a way that can encourage financial health through levers of cost reductions, resource allocation, and increased accountability.
Measuring IT Budgets
This one is pretty obvious, but accurately measuring the budget and tracking it as a project progresses is very important. It will put teams in a position to stay on target or address anomalies well ahead of over-spending.
Showback (Chargeback)
A common approach from IT departments is to provide ‘chargebacks’ to other departments for rendered services. This demonstrates the value IT brings, but it is often met with resentment.
By switching to ‘showback’ IT teams can measure and report on the resources allocated to each department, maintaining the awareness. Measuring where resources are allocated can really help IT identify areas of weakness or stress.
Application And Service Of Total Cost
This metric helps to understand what it costs to deliver each IT offering. For example, how much do you spend on storage, networks, security, and which departments use these offerings the most.
This can help uncover the ‘long-tail’ application run cost, while also aligning the expenses with business objectives.
IT KPIs To Supplemental Financial KPIs
This sounds a little vague, but measuring other less obvious metrics can also become extremely helpful.
For example, moving to cheaper technologies or tracking costs by activity (development vs maintenance vs running systems), can highlight areas of improvement.
Measuring People in IT
This area not only focuses on measuring people within IT teams but also measuring the people the IT team services.
Whether they are other members of the organization or customers. As such, it is a critical area to measure, as we become increasingly reliant on tech to deliver products and services.
IT Happiness (NPS)
We’ve covered NPS in the Customer Service KPIs, yet this also applies to IT teams. As it helps them measure customer satisfaction from a technological perspective.
Certainly, it can help highlight frustrations in user experience or tech issues that may not be obvious internally (speed, lagging, etc.).
KPIs On Service Desk
KPIs for the service desk include the ticket resolving process, new processing system procedures, point of sale, and queuing procedures among other computerized systems.
The effectiveness and accuracy of the service desk department will determine how much the end-users will rely on the company to solve their related concerns.
IT KPIs For Employee engagement and satisfaction
Although new and exciting projects are great, most of the time IT teams spend most of their day helping other employees and customers in the less sexy tasks (“I forgot my password again”).
For that reason, it’s important to measure the level of engagement from employees and maintain focus on the overall strategy. You can measure this through surveys (eNPS - see HR KPIs).
Team initiative(s)
This is almost a direct result of the level of engagement from the IT team. Highly engaged teams are more likely to come up with new initiatives and/or new ways of solving current challenges.
Measuring internal initiatives will not only give you an indication of the level of engagement, but also the readiness to tackle unexpected turns in an agile environment.
There are plenty more KPIs for IT Teams you can measure, but this should give you a good starting point if you are building a strategy for your IT department or developing new organizational goals.
.png)
.png)
