Adopt a modern approach, add to your skill set, and meet the service-level agreements of your organization.

Editor's Note: This article is an introduction to the white paper "3 Essential Steps to Successful Performance Management," which is available free from the MC White Paper Center.

The art of performance management is often made to look cumbersome and complex, but does it have to be?

This white paper by Ash Giddings, IT industry expert, discusses the art of performance management today. He reflects on the IT industry of the 1980s, recognizing how different it is today, or is it?

In his first job for a major insurance company, his key responsibilities included measuring how much disk space each department had consumed in the past month, measuring the system response times experienced by end users, and comparing figures to the previous month and previous year. He reported on his findings and provided his recommendations.

As his organization changed and went from a 9–5 Monday-to-Friday business to a seven-day-a-week business with extensive hours, demands on system resources dramatically increased. He had to justify what the IT department did for the business. It was no longer adequate to simply manage the hardware, software, network, and infrastructure; he had to prove he was managing it.  

Reporting was vital because key decisions, such as significant investment in new hardware or extra headcount, had to be agreed upon, and there was no room for error.

The basic principles of performance management have remained unchanged throughout the years, and based on his experience, Ash is able to define three essential steps to successful performance management.

These three steps are "monitoring and alerting," "adjusting," and "reviewing" and are still as relevant today as they were then.  

In this white paper, Ash shares his tried and trusted process that he has used in numerous organizations with great success. He looks at how, with the correct solution in place, these three steps can be used extensively as the underpinning disciplines that help make the modern approach to performance management so straightforward.

In his current role as Technical Services Manager for Halcyon Software, Ash travels to customer data centers around the world, advising IT managers and system administrators about system performance, the challenges they face, and ways to make their lives easier.

Using this process in combination with modern monitoring tools, you can have a successful strategy for performance management that will become a valuable cornerstone in your IT department and your organization.  

By utilizing the flexibility of modern monitoring software and using some common sense, you can ensure that not only IT but the business as a whole sees you and the work you perform as a real asset.

Download this free white paper from the MC White Paper Center to learn about Ash's approach and his three essential steps to successful performance management. 

About Halcyon Software

Halcyon Software is a global leader in multi-platform systems management solutions that reduce the complexity and cost of monitoring critical business systems, core applications and processes. They help companies prevent business disruption, increase the efficiency of their IT services and save costs.  In most cases, Halcyon’s solutions increase IT efficiency by 30 – 40 percent, delivering significant savings and a rapid return on investment – often in less than six months.

Halcyon achieves this in three ways:

Monitoring: Halcyon’s monitoring software keeps a vigilant watch on the most critical IT systems and core applications on which business depends. IT administrators receive early warnings of any potential problems or ‘bottlenecks’ before they affect the organization.

Automating: Halcyon enables IT teams to set up ‘self–corrective actions’ to issues or problems to ensure that they never impact the business again.  IT teams can also automate regular tasks, checks or jobs which would normally be undertaken manually. This frees up valuable resources, saves costs and helps to eliminate human error. 

Reporting: Halcyon’s cloud-based reporting solution proves to management that the IT team is achieving the service levels demanded by the business or flags any issues so they can be quickly resolved. 

Halcyon’s products support IBM Power Systems servers running IBM i, AIX, Linux and Windows. With regional offices in the United States, Australia and UK, Halcyon also has a network of partners and distributors supporting territories world-wide. For further information, please visit www.halcyonsoftware.com