Monthly reporting best practice for IT manager

[albertwt]

I'm planning to create a monthly report to share with the IT Director but now I'm struggling with providing them with information that they care about. I also have many sources of information that I want to include. So I wonder what fellow Experts are doing in this regard ?

 

Capacity Management ?

What does your management/executive team care about?

Backup reports?

Antivirus statistics?

 

I want to give them information that's simple enough for them to see what we need to give attention to IT-wise.

 

Please share what has worked for you here.

 

Thanks

[NikChillin]

we only inform them on things that need upgrading and any problems which might arise or cause problems. Don't bother with small stuff. Perhaps a wish list too.

[albertwt]

ah... yes, that what I include at the moment. Wish list, lol sounds great too.

[GrumbleDook]

A couple of areas to look at ... remember that stats can be made to say a variety of things.

 

1 - If you have a support desk / ticket system, then it would be reasonable to see what reports you can get out of there for things like number of calls, the breakdown of types of calls (eg training, installations, damage to kit, etc) to see if that can help with planning for CPD, working out whether particular hardware is worth the money (ie it cost a bit more than kit you have had previously but is reducing the amount of required support time do to hardware failures by 80%), etc. It can also be used to provide evidence for why some of your team (if you have one) need additional training ... but this can be part of your capacity management approach.

 

2 - Stock changes. It is nice for SLT to be easily able to see they have x machines, of which y are in active use. Some basic usage stats of storage space (amount provide, amount used, amount available by user / year group / dept, amount backed up, frequency of backups, etc), consumable status (including use against predictions so you can track if you are spending more on last year),

 

3 - Requests / complaints / compliments - this is a chance to run through any issues to ensure that they have been dealt with. If you have a CAB (even if it is just you and the IT Director) then some of this can be done there, but try and deal with it as 'service management' for the complaints, etc.

 

4 - Targets - If you have targets (such as in your SLA, delivery of new services / projects, etc) then this is where you can formerly put it.

 

5 - Strategic planning - this is where you tick off things from the School Development plan that involve you and where you can raise future ideas / plans ... either your own or stuff people have brought to you.

 

There is cross over in a number of the things above, depending on how your schools is set up ... but hopefully it gives a few more ideas to you.

[gaz350]

This academic year im aiming (key word here!) to do Termly reports instead of monthly. Mainly due to how term holidays end up screwing with any stats. Should also link in nicely with the departments Termly key tasks from our Dev plan!

[albertwt]

great, thanks to all for the input, I really appreciate your reply and input :-)