MTTR out: MTRS in

The Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) metric was widely known - but it has been replaced by a more meaningful and 'holistic' measurement.

The Mean Time to Restore Service (MTRS) is considered to be a better measurement for issues relating to availability and change management as it encompasses all aspects of service restoration and not just one element.

The problem with MTTR was that while a component (or part of a service) may have been repaired the service itself was still not available to an end user. Take a simple example. Server hard drive crashes, service is unavailable, emergency change is rushed through and the hard drive is replaced.

In this example the MTTR is measured from the time of the actual crash until the new hard drive is snapped into place. A good metric that can reflect on the overall performance of the IT department, but not a metric that is of any interest to the customers and users of that service.

Once the hard drive is snapped into place, the server is powered on and 15 or 20 minutes later the customers and end users can get access to the service. It is these 15 or 20 minutes that equate to MTRS and make it a better overall metric.

MTRS will be taken from the point of failure to the point where the service can be accessed by customers and end users.

Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) remains as a way to measure the uptime of a component in the service chain, but now the MTRS is the true downtime of a service.

It's acronym heaven !

ITIL folk around the world must be very impressed with the entire new range of acronyms that the ITIL v3 authors have introduced.

The DSL is out, but the DML (definitive media library) is in... the UC has been banished to glossary status, but around the Service Catalog there is a whole new species of TLAs.

LOS (Lines of Service), SLP (Service Level Package), CSP (Core Service Package) and UP (User profiles) are all introduced in Service Strategy.

SLAs and OLAs remain, but now we can throw in some Service Acceptance Criteria (SAC), Service Design Package (SDP) and ISM (Information Security Management).

The KEDB (Known Error database) was there before, but not as an abbreviation and there is just a smorgasbord of SKMS (Service Knowledge Management System) and CMS (Configuration Management System). Resource capacity management is lost forever and in its place we find a slimline CCM (Component Capacity Management).

Thankfully get to keep our beloved MTBSI, MTTR and MTBF -but joining the MT family is MTRS (Mean Time to Restore Service).

My understanding of all of these new terms and concepts is a WIP, but the ROI I get will be PFS - I need a PSO !!