Delivering excellent service to our customers is a priority for many of us. From a service management perspective part of that requires us to review how we provide that service through continual improvement initiatives. The first step for us is to look at where we are today and ask the question "Do we have a strategy to help us further establish service management.
Established
Service Management Program
First you may need to define what “established” really
means. This indicates that we are performing several processes which are accepted by IT and the processes have been documented and
communicated through some level of training. Each process has an identified
owner whose goal is to leverage the process to reach targets set forth to
improve the delivery of service to align with business outcomes. Where possible
this process may be automated through some form of tool, however the later can
only be achieved when the process has reached a reasonable degree of maturity. Remember
the tools are only that, they will simply help you streamline what you already
have.
If you are still thinking that you have fairly mature processes,
start thinking about what the output processes look like. For example once we
have a solid incident management process how does that relate to proactive
activities such as problem, or event management. Where do things like knowledge
come into play to further improve the delivery of services, for example.
It is crucial to remember that this initial look shouldn’t
be done alone. Solicit information from several sources. How are these
processes improving the operations teams, have you spoken with your service delivery
or business relationship managers to see what service improvements these
processes are producing. You may find that there are several items to improve
in the larger scheme of things. The key is to keep it simple and target the items
that will align to the IT and business objectives.
The ‘not
so’ established service management program
You are thinking to yourself, “OK, I know we aren’t that
established but we are doing some things”. The main difference between the two
is the ability to do the processes without much thought. These processes are
meant to guide us, so if we spend more time trying to figure out the process as
compared to the actual work we are probably on the lower end of the maturity
scale. Some key indicators of this is that there are inconsistencies in the way
we perform work, people are doing things differently even when they are on the
same teams. At the end of the day the delivery of service is happening but how
we get there may be the winding trail. There is nothing wrong with that, after
all you need to walk before you can run. The first step identifies that you
need to make improvements and then actually do just that.
How do I do that?
First at the fundamental level, you should have an
identified process owner. In the beginning you may only have one person who
might be accountable and responsible to the process, but determine who that is
and communicate that information to those who will be impacted by this
information. Once you have identified the ‘who’ you need to be able to identify
the ‘what’. The process owner should be able to outline how the process works. Sharing
the inner working of the process may require training, and a place where people
can revisit and review the training or process documentation. This is why
keeping it simple is important.
Think of it this way, training someone to build a chair
from scratch can be complex and take some finely tuned skills. Building a chair
from a store with an Allen key has a consistent process which is simple to
understand. Either way the end result is ‘something to sit on’ which is a
start.
After this has been established you need to continually
review the process to ensure that it is working the way it was envisioned and
when there are challenges, as there likely will be, you make the needed
adjustments.
It is the act of keeping it simple that I can’t stress
enough, doing this will allow your processes to grow over time and will keep
them scalable for later iterations of improvement.
Feel free to connect with me on Twitter @ryanrogilvie and/or on LinkedIn
Labels: Continual Service Improvement, ITIL, ITSM