Service Manager Reporting

[James Ainsworth]

As part of Hornbill and the Service Manager app, over the years there has been several different areas where we have expanded our reporting options and ability.  However, we are still wanting to improve and grow our offering.  I am looking for feedback from our customers about our reporting.

What are your biggest challenges that you experience when it comes to providing reports?

What are the top features or abilities that you would like to see added to Service Manager reporting?

What are the best parts of the existing reporting tools?

 

 

[lomixture]

James,

We use the reporting tool a lot within Service Manager, and have come to be fairly comfortable with it.

For me, I think I can provide the following feedback based on my experience with the tool:

Requests

• I'd like to be able to see graphs within the reporting tool, rather than having to exit and build widgets etc based on them. To have the ability to see our data in a pie/bar chart, or perhaps even word clouds of the most regularly used words on a specific question for example would be really cool.
   
• On the wiki, there is a page for the h_itsm_requests which we refer back to fairly frequently. Could this be linked somehow, like on Microsoft Excel, where it picks up your key sequence and gives you recommended elements to input? Screenshot for reference.
  
   
• Could we have libraries for reports within reports, rather than just when they're published? As more teams and departments come onto our system, our list of reports is being enormous and so to have top level categories where we could only choose to see the reports for our area would be tidier and easier to navigate.
   

Challenges

•  I personally still struggle with the SQL Schema Designer reports, and linking tables or knowing what to choose to get the report I require. It is very confusing to me, but perhaps that's my limited understanding. I think my point here is, is there a way of having almost an information icon next to things to help and guide you in the right direction? Something you could hover over, or that prompts what to do next to get your results? Even typing that, it sounds too broad...
   
•  Our reports seem to have an issue now whereby we can't run a report for longer than a 30 day/month period. We have a number of 'lifetime' reports that no longer work. This happened around the same time we upgraded to Microsoft Windows 10/Office 365 and so I wonder if it is more a compatibility of the output files rather than the reports themselves. The reports all see to take over 30 seconds to run, compared to other reports which take 7ish seconds. This is making the reports 'time out' and show as blank.

 

Top Features

• I like how clear it is to see which reports are available and which are in development, it's a good way of tracking what we're working on and what others shouldn't touch!
   
• How flexible the reports are; choosing your columns, filtering, order etc - it makes creating the report you require very easy.
   
• Publishing to documents, for individuals who don't have analyst accounts to view is very handy - it's a clear and concise way for them to track their report histories and what's going on.

 

Overall, we have had great success with the reporting tool and I think some tweaks could make it even better.

Lauren

 

[Gareth Noon]

I would love to see the dashboard features expanded so they could be used to plot trends and not just the statistics from the previous month/set time period. This would save me having to export the data and using a pivot table to plot the annual trend, e.g. tickets logged by service for the last year, by month.

It would also be good to see the standard reports expanded within the Reports section too, e.g Average ratings by service.

I'm a big fan of the dashboard which helps me to provide monthly management statistics in a graphical format and if it were to include trend analysis that would be great.

Admittedly I have not done much with the Advanced Analytics tool and have a Trained for Life session booked next week to expand my knowledge in this area but from what I have seen, I agree with Lauren in that it would be good to be able to see graphs within the reporting tool, rather than having to exit and build widgets based on them.

Gareth