Much like a raft you need to make sure that you have all the right
people on board to ensure you can make the journey. What this really boils down
to from a Service Management perspective is:
·
People
· Process
·
Product and
·
Partners
All these four components are in place in some capacity in your
organization. The key is to identify how much of a role they play. In essence,
the question you have to ask yourself is “are these the right people or the
wrong people in your CSI raft”?
You need to understand what you want to improve. This should be looked at from
the customer’s needs. In other words “What is going to improve the customer
experience”? When you can identify what
you want to improve you can look through your 4P’s to see how you can make
those improvements through those components. Identifying the inputs and outputs
will allow us to define who we need to engage, or in this case who we need in
the raft to fix this issue
Just because some parties may not be vested in this improvement initiative
today doesn't mean that we don't need them tomorrow. We are not suggesting that
we kick them overboard, at least not yet. Ensure that we have open lines of communication
and that all the improvement activities are transparent to all stakeholders. There
should be no secret that we are looking to make things better. This goes for IT
as well as you customer.
Let’s look at an example.
We have application “abc” which needs to have major releases regularly every
6 months. The business has had some constraints around as they put it “changing
anything” until they are complete with some client side project work. They need
“abc” up and running all the time operating the same way until the project has
been completed this fiscal year. As projects tend to do the launch dates were pushed
out and as such so has the ability to update “abc” we are now at a point where
we are several releases behind from the application perspective and some of “abc”
tie ins to other applications are not working as they should as the releases
missed impact those connections though web interface constraints. We are
starting to see incidents regularly because of that releases we have not done
What we need to do now is to ensure that we have some agreements with
the business on when we are allowed to have agreed on maintenance windows. Whether
this is part of a service agreement or part of your release policy this should
have be flushed out. Now we know, we need to let the business know that having
no managed outages now may create unmanaged incidents down the road. This would
speak to all 4P’s in some way.
Overall taking a look at your process, people, products and partners
from another perspective is just one component of continual service
improvements. Doing this will allow to see if you have the right parties in
your raft and that they are all paddling in the right direction.
Labels: Continual Service Improvement, Service Management
