An information technology (IT) department can be rated by its performance and reliability. Assessing these factors requires a plan. This plan must take numerous factors into consideration and explain how they will be used to produce an overall assessment of the department.

Make a plan that evaluates the performance and reliability of an IT department. This plan must include the means to assess both internal (employee-facing) and external (customer-facing) IT services.

You may use a rating system such as letter grades, percentages, a scale of 1-10, or a different approach, but this is a minor component of the plan. The key to this assignment is to show what you will be measuring, how you will measure it, and how this informs the reader about the overall performance and reliability of the department.

The following resource may be useful in constructing your plan (additional resources that may be helpful are listed in this unit's learning activities):

• Evaluating Performance in Information Technology

When you are finished creating the plan, consider the following scenario:

• Northwind Consulting has been hired to assess the IT department of Forgotten Ventures, Inc. (FVI), which provides travel services around the world. FVI has 1,500 employees spread between offices in New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, 75% of whom work at home for at least half of the work week. FVI's IT department has 37 employees spread between all three offices. A central IT office in Atlanta controls the networking architecture and domain structure, which is based on Active Directory (Windows Server). The company uses networked human resources software in all three offices, accounting software in New York and LA, Microsoft Office in all offices, and Microsoft Teams and Outlook to coordinate both office and at-home workers. A custom application called TravelRite (TR) runs off a server in Atlanta, with client software to access TR installed on many FVI employee's home and work computers and mobile devices. A Web-based ticketing system coordinates trouble tickets for the IT departments. TR is the listed application on approximately 40% of the tickets. No other single application applies to more than 5% of the tickets.

In the last section of your paper, apply your plan to this scenario and indicate how it fares. You may invent the specific metric results for this example. Bear in mind that it is not important whether the metrics you use are optimal or even effective. What matters is how you have utilized them and what you propose them to show.