General

A typical benchmarking process for a customer

Activity	Remark
Select a Partner	the ITSMF-Benchmark will only be sold through certified partners who need to be a ITSMF member
Customer's details	ITSMF members will receive a 600 Euro refund directly (no partner involvement)
Payment by Partner	Only after payment has been completed, the questionnaire will be created
Questionnaire(s) sent to Partner	The Partner designs the project as they will have more experience
Return complete set of answers	All questions need to be answered
Draft report	To ensure the best possible data quality, a specific draft report will be returned to be checked
Return final report	A standard report is generated and sent to the Partner. The Partner can add his own summary, comments and recommendations.
Re-runs	Re-runs and simulations require an extra fee
Evaluation	2 months after the final report has been sent, an evaluation questionnaire will be mailed directly to the customer. The results, which will be shared with the Partner, will become input in the benchmarking-improvement-process.

 

The Benchmarking process and the steps

The regular benchmark process consists of the following steps:

• Scoping. First is must be made very clear what shall, and shall not be investigated, eg. the Computer center, the LAN/WAN or the application development. In this phase, based on criteria (architecture, company size, cost efficiency, quality and scope of services), it will be determined with which peer group the customer is to be compared.
• Planning. After scoping of the project, the actual planning will happen. The data collection process is planned and the right people to supply the data are identified.
• Data collection. In this phase the data is collected. If it is not available, sampling can be performed.
• Validation. Following on a first analyses, the data is validated. Double counting, type errors, etc. have to be corrected to guarantee the end quality of the analyses and advice.
• Analyses of the data. After validation the source data is analysed top-down, so it will become clear very quickly where possible improvement can be realized.
• Presentation of findings. In the final presentation a number of highlevel-results are presented out of the final report. The attention will soon go to those parts that are eligible for improvement. Based on comparison with the peer group (best-in-class) the (cost, performance) differences are shown, including the substantiation of these differences. In the end this will result in an overview of actions to be taken.
• Action planning. Finally the actions can be turned into an action plan. They should be based on a detail analyses of the causes of the differences shown.