Conversations from the Mirror42 Team

As a European, I am amazed with all the statistics during an American baseball game. Keeping scores seems to be a national hobby. But they do have a purpose. As in any sport, the objective of the game is to score more runs (points) than your opponent. There is a very clear objective, and in each stage of the game, different tactics and people are applied - based on statistics. This enables going forward to best outcome based on previous experiences. This book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” even poses that using a better set of statistics gives a competitive advantage.

So, does this also apply on something, like say, Change Management (as defined in the ITIL library)? Change management is not a repetitive proces, each change can be different, but the main goal seems clear: implement a change cost-effective without non-planned disturbance for end-users. Let’s say we have statistics from previous experiences, that tell us that the type of change that we are planning has failed its objectives in 35% of implementing such as change. Maybe we even know that in all change implementation we have on average 4 hours more downtime as planned (unplanned disturbance). Maybe we even know that changes planned in the weekend have a 90% more change of being performed within its objectives (maybe due to the fact that the people who are responsible are not directly disturbed by other problems). So what would be the course of action, looking at previous experiences. I would say, we have any of the following ‘game plans’:

1. plan in the weekend
2. communicate more planned down-time to manage expectations of end-users
3. put your best performing people on the job (if it is critical that this change does not fail)

Although you may not be able to change the objectives of the game (# 2), I think the statistics of previous experiences gives input to the game plan to ensure that the objectives are met. You might even fail, but that gives new input for future changes. This is one of the reasons to track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), the baseball statistics of business processes: learn from experiences to improve your game plan.

P.s. I have posted some baseball KPIs in the KPI library.

Patch 4.1.5 as an upgrade for version 4.1.4 is available.

Solved issues in 4.1.5:

* Webtables in tabs will now load when clicked
* Standard commandtimeout in prefs.inc and m42collector.exe.config of 600 for timeouts in SQL Server
* Type mismatch when adding new view in metamart
* Mirror42.Indexer.Indexer - Object reference not set to an instance of an object
* Error search metric value
* Export / import portals and portlets does not succeed
* Export will not more codes instead of numbers. import will accept both codes and numbers
* ORA-12899: value too large for column "ROLLBACKLINES"."RBL_PREVIOUS"
* Check of missing instances slow in extract instances with >5000 instances

I am proud to announce that after only two months of its inception the free Key Performance Indicator (KPI) library collected more than 500 KPIs in more than 50 business processes, ranging from IT management, human resource management, sales and marketing, and various vertical industries such as transportation, healthcare and manufacturing.

To link up to the library visit http://www.kpilibrary.com.

Patch 4.1.4 as an upgrade for version 4.1.3 is available.

Solved issues in 4.1.4:

• Monitors are not shown if they do not have a custom tab
• Remove tabs in domain monitors does not work
• Indexer fails on “slave” servers when running in multiple server mode
• Collector can be used to collect historical details