Conversations from the Mirror42 Team

We at Mirror42 wish you all the best for 2008. We hope you know where your towel is.

Perhaps a tacky title, but it may have caught your attention. We have moved offices last week, and we are now located in the center of Amsterdam, capital of the Netherlands. We are right next to the Amstel river, and we have a beautiful view. For our new office details please visit our website.

Now to the more important news, why are we going greener? Well, before our move we had 5 people driving each a car to work, and they have switched to bike or train. That saves 100 hours of car use each month! And of course is much less stressful.

If you would like to visit our new ‘crib’ you are more than welcome.

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.

If it’s up… It’s down… per year

• 90%: 876 hours
• 95%: 438 hours
• 99%: 87 hours, 36 minutes
• 99.9%: 8 hours, 45 minutes, 36 second
• 99.99%: 52 minutes, 33.6 seconds
• 99.999%: 5 minutes, 15.36 seconds
• 99.9999%: 31.68 seconds