Metrics That Matter - Part 2 - First Fix Rate
In my previous Metrics that Matter post, I discussed how high performing IT organizations had the shortest mean time to repair (MTTR). In other words, high performers repaired service outages and incidents the quickest.
In this post, I'll excerpt from my recent article that covered another metric that stratified the high performers from medium and low performers that we have studied in the IT Controls Performance Study.
This metric is the First Fix Rate (FFR). The First Fix Rate measures the percentage of incidents that are successfully restored on the first fix attempt. This metric is often used in the connotation of the service desk, where it measures how often the incident is resolved at the first point of contact between a customer and the service provider. However, in this context, we are measuring not the service desk, but the IT operations staff who are actually working on the incident to restore service.
The reason this metric is one of my favorites is that it, almost more than any other metric, indicates the degree to which a culture of causality exists in an IT organization. The ITPI wasn't the only organization to uncover this phenomenon. The Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) study showed that their high-performing customers reboot servers 20 times less often than average and have five times fewer "blue screens of death."
Link to full article.