Measurement and reporting is a practice among the 34 practices in ITIL 4 that you don't need to know in depth for the foundation level exam. But we at itil.diontraining.com, brought to you by Dion Training, do not want to just leave any of our readers hanging. So, here is an article that is going to cover it to give you a good general understanding of it.

Measurement and reporting is a good practice to know because there are pieces of this that has been discussed in some of our other articles. If you have not checked any of them, then waste not a second longer and go read some of them.

Now, measurement and reporting is the practice of supporting good decision making and continual improvement by decreasing levels of uncertainty. You'll do this by measuring things. Try to read one of our articles here at itil.diontraining.com about the continual improvement model discussing about measuring and creating a baseline. After taking action, you have to go back and measured again to see how things changed. That's what measuring and reporting is all about. When discussing measurement and reporting, two key terms come up a lot. It's KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, and CSFs, or Critical Success Factors.

In measurement and reporting, it's very easy to measure outputs, but it's difficult to measure outcomes. One of the difficulties of this practice is being able to figure out what things you really should be measuring and are you measuring the right things. Because you want to make sure you're measuring the outcome and not just the outputs. Again, this is an entire field with people who are dedicated to it. You're going to get people from business analysis that are going to be working in this field to really help you drive those numbers and figure out what are those key metrics that your business or organization needs.