Throughout the period of request handling and fulfillment the service request status is monitored for several reasons:

• It must be ensured that the status of the request can be communicated to the originating user at any time.
• The status of the request must be known in order to initiate escalation (according to existing escalation management policies and guidelines) if the current fulfillment status breaches agreed SLAs.

Monitoring the request status not only relates to individual requests, but also to all requests collectively so that the overall compliance with SLAs for request fulfillment as a service or part of a service can be controlled.

Analysis and reporting on the service requests will be carried out on a predetermined basis (weekly, monthly, and when exceptions are indicated) in order to control the quality of request fulfillment, the compliance with existing SLAs, for planning purposes and as a basis for improvements.

Examples of reports to be produced include:

• The number, categories, and sources of requests
• The elapsed time until requests are fulfilled
• The workload per request or per staff member
• Analysis of patterns of potentially avoidable requests that might have been caused through incorrect or inadequate user understanding of service characteristics and features

There will be reports about the availability of the request fulfillment center and the overall compliance with SLAs. Basically, the reports serve as a measure to check if the service requests are handled in a way that complies with the agreed targets.

These reports and their analysis will also help to do some trend analysis and forecasting with regard to service requests, relevant for the planning of staffing and other request fulfillment related topics. The output of this process will also be available to the knowledge management process with the objective of enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of request fulfillment.