Category: Best Practices

Better Requirements Definition to Improve Time to Market and Quality

    Fred Alsup

We have two features this week: the first and best is Fred Alsup has provided his perspective on best practices in requirements definition; and I have also added and slightly updated a post on Agility and Innovation in the ‘Asides’ page.  Enjoy and have a great week! Best, Jim Ditmore

To deliver cutting-edge, market-advantage systems for your company requires allying your company’s business and operations experts, as well as marketing and sales leaders with technology experts. For a large firm, you may have several if not dozens of projects with these multi-disciplinary teams. Complex projects with participants articulating requirements from different perspectives using terminology unique to their discipline without a rigorous approach is one of the primary reasons for poor requirements. Frequent issues include ambiguous or ill-defined requirements, missing requirements or poorly defined bridges between areas, or worse, a key expert is not focused on their area until late in the project (when it is far more difficult or expensive to correct). Further traditional approaches often result in team members feeling that “everyone’s speaking different languages” or “I’m not being heard”.

This happens both when little time is spent on requirements or, most disappointingly, when even when a great deal of time is spent. Such a result is often due to the requirements elicitation approach and results in negative consequences for the project. The project financial loss includes the extended cost of the system, all of the time spent in meetings trying to elicit the requirements or review documents. And, of course there is the lost opportunity of not having the system that would optimize the work or provide market advantage. And the relationship between the business and IT becomes or remains strained.

Traditional requirements elicitation or gathering methods are often the cause of these issues. Cycling over and over the requirements definition with individual users and experts or small groups in a document-based, waterfall approach results in many issues:

  • A lengthy process where each contributor often only sees a part of the envisioned system (e.g., like the 4 blind men touching an elephant and coming up with 4 different conclusions as to what it is)
  • Business and technology roles are not clearly defined and often have overlap resulting in user requirements and technical solutions mixed together
  • The requirements definitions in a document based capture approach are often overly complex and miss the essence of of what should be done
  • Key experts are often overloaded, thus frequently cannot spend adequate time on the area in a traditional process  resulting in either delays or gaps
  • The spark of innovation due to bringing multiple different areas to solution for the business together never occurs

In essence, by gathering requirements in such a methodical but piecemeal and lengthy process causes these outcomes. In order to break out and develop far higher quality requirements and spark innovation and outstanding solutions, you should apply a rapid requirements process that brings the contributors together in a structured and intense manner. You will be able to define requirements in a far shorter time period with much greater quality. Very similar to Agile approaches where scrum sessions with a focused set of users drive a tight cycle time to define interfaces or small systems, rapid requirements enables requirements elicitation for large and complex systems with many disciplines to occur in a tight, joint set of cycles.

The essentials for executing a rapid requirements approach are as follows:

  • Set aside two or more days for the requirements elicitation. If the system is to reengineer or deliver a business process, add one day for each additional business area the process impacts (e.g., if back office and middle office, then 3 days total, if front office as well, 4 days). Usually it is best if the sessions are 5 or 6 hours per day versus 8 as users can then handle regular priority work rather than interrupt the session.
  • Utilize a facilitator and scribe in the sessions. For larger sessions, multiple scribes or assistants are needed. The scribes should be strong analysts, not just note keepers. The facilitator must be skilled at communications and elicitation as well as effective at driving for results.
  • Bring together all the key users and providers for the session. Attendance is mandatory, delegation should be frowned upon. Having even one contributor missing can make a major difference, lead to a major omission. And individuals must operate in one role only (e.g., users cannot define how to implement, first this is a requirements session not a system design session and second, this overruns the provider role). Having individuals act in one and only one role during a session, in my experience is of critical importance, if not common practice.
  • Facilitators have full control and responsibility for running the meeting, asking questions, and directing other role players in the question and answering. The facilitator should have the ability to build deep rapport, quickly with each participant in the session while balancing that with the need to be assertive and even commanding if necessary.  The facilitator should understand whether expansion or closure on a topic is appropriate and then formulate the right question to include suggesting user requirements (but not make decisions about user requirements).
  • Scribes listen and document requirements using a defined grammar. A scribe may suggest user requirements but not make decisions about user requirements or user prioritization.
  • Users define the user requirements and determine prioritization. It is best if the users (business experts) also seek to improve business process or synergize during the session. It can be helpful to have process experts (e.g., lean, etc) assist the users in defining their target process as part of the requirements session.
  • Solution providers (e.g., technology or operations) ask clarifying questions concerning user requirements. A solution provider may suggest user requirements but not make decisions about user requirements or user prioritization.
  • It can also be helpful to include risk or legal experts as part of the team.
  • Ensure that your target process includes inherent measurement and quality management as part of each subprocess as appropriate.

By bringing everyone together in a structured and facilitated session, connections are made, misunderstandings addressed and synergies achieved that just would not happen otherwise. Full and engaged customer and supplier representation is a common sense that does not commonly occur with traditional methods. With this rapid requirements approach you will get higher quality requirements in far less time with greater participation and better solutions. And you will start your project off with high quality requirements that are much more likely to lead to project success. For more information on Rapid Requirements, don’t hesitate to visit the site.

Fred Alsup

 

 

 

Tying Consumption to Cost: Allocation Best Practices

    Jim D

In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote about the over-exploitation of common resources in an essay titled the “The Tragedy of the Commons“. While Garrett wrote about the overexploitation of common pastureland where individual herders overused and diminished common pasture, there can be a very similar effect with IT resources within a large corporation. If there is no cost associated with the usage of IT resources by different business unit, than each unit will utilize the the IT resources to maximize its potential benefit to the detriment of the corporate as a whole. Thus, to ensure effective use of the IT resources there must be some association of cost or allocation between the internal demand and consumption by each business unit. A best practice allocation approach enables business transparency of IT cost and business drivers of IT usage so that thoughtful business decisions for the company as a whole can be made with the minimum of allocation overhead and effort.

A well-designed allocations framework will ensure this effective association as well as:

  • provide transparency to IT costs and the particular business unit costs and profitability,
  • avoid wasteful demand and alter overconsumption behaviors
  • minimize pet projects and technology ‘hobbies’

To implement an effective allocations framework there are several foundation steps. First, you must ensure you have the corporate and business unit CFOs’ support and the finance team resources to implement and run the allocations process. Generally, CFOs look for greater clarity on what drives costs within the corporation.  Allocations allow significant clarity on IT costs which are usually a good-sized chunk of the corporation’s costs.  CFOs are usually highly supportive of a well-thought out allocations approach. So, first garner CFO support along with adequate finance resources.

Second, you must have a reasonably well-defined set of services and an adequately accurate IT asset inventory. If these are not in place, you must first set about defining your services (e.g. and end user laptop service that includes laptop, OS, productivity software, and remote access or a storage service of high performance Tier 1 storage by Terabyte) and ensuring your inventory of IT assets is minimally accurate (70 to 80 %). If there are some gaps, they can be addressed by leveraging a trial allocation period where numbers and assets are published, no monies are actually charged, but every business unit reviews its allocated assets with IT and ensures it is correctly aligned. Once you have the service defined and the assets inventoried, your finance team must then set about to identify which costs are associated with which services. They should work closely with your management team to identify a ‘cost pool’ for each service or asset component. Again, these costs pools should be at least reasonably accurate but do not need to be perfect to begin a successful allocation process.

The IT services defined should be as readily understandable as possible. The descriptions and missions should not be esoteric except where absolutely necessary. They should be easily associated with business drivers and volumes (such as number of employees, or branches, etc) wherever possible.  In essence, all major categories of IT expenditure should have an associated service or set of services and the services should be granular enough so that each service or component can be easily understood and each one’s drivers should be easily distinguished and identified. The targets should should be somewhere between 50 and 150 services for the typical large corporation.  More services than 150 will likely lead to more effort being spent on very small services and result in too much overhead. Significantly, less than 50 services could result in clumping of services that are hard to distinguish or enable control. Remember the goal is to provide adequate allocations data at the minimum effort for effectiveness.

The allocations framework must have an overall IT owner and a senior Finance sponsor (preferably the CFO). CFOs want to implement systems that encourage effective corporate use of resources so they are a natural advocate for a sensible allocation framework. There should also be a council to oversee the allocation effort and provide feedback and direction where majors users and the CFO or designate are on the council. This will ensure both adequate feedback as well as buy-in and support for successful implementation and appropriate methodology revisions as the program grows. As the allocations process and systems mature, ensure that any significant methodology changes are reviewed and approved by the allocation council with sufficient advance notice to the Business Unit CFOs. My experience has been that everyone agrees to a methodology change if it is in their favor and reduces their bill, but everyone is resistant if it impacts their business unit’s finances regardless of how logical the change may be. Further, the allocation process will bring out intra business unit tensions toward each other, especially for those that have an increase versus those that have a decrease, if the process is not done with plenty of communication and clear rationale.

Once you start the allocations, even if during a pilot or trial period, make sure you are doing transparent reporting. You or your leads should have a monthly meeting with each business area with good clear reports. Include your finance lead and the business unit finance lead in the meeting to ensure everyone is on the same financial page.  Remember, a key outcome is to enable your users to understand their overall costs, what the cost is for each services and, what business drivers impact which services and thus what costs they will bear. By establishing this linkage clearly the business users will then look to modify business demand so as to optimize their costs. Further, most business leaders will also use this allocations data and new found linkage to correct poor over-consumption behavior (such as users with two or three PCs or phones) within their organizations. But for them to do this you must provide usable reporting with accurate inventories. The best option is to enable managers to peruse their costs through an intranet interface for such
end-user services such as mobile phones, PCs, etc . There should be readily accessible usage and cost reports to enable them to understand their team’s demand and how much each unit costs.  They should have the option right on the same screens to discontinue, update or start services. In my experience, it is always amazing that once leaders understand their costs, they will want to manage them down, and if they have the right tools and reports, managing down poor consumption happens faster than a snowman melting in July — exactly the effect you were seeking.

There are a few additional caveats and guides to keep in mind:

  • In your reporting, don’t just show this month’s costs, show the cost trend over time and provide a projection of future unit costs and business demand
  • Ensure you include budget overheads in the cost allocation, otherwise you will have a budget shortfall and neglect key investment in the infrastructure to maintain it.
  • Similarly, make sure you account for full lifecycle costs of a service in the allocation — and be conservative in your initial allocation pricing, revisions later that are upward due to missed costs will be painful
  • For ‘build’ or ‘project’ costs, do not use exact resource pricing. Instead use an average price to avoid the situation where every business unit demands only the lowest cost IT  resources for their project resulting in a race to the bottom for lowest cost resources and no ability to expand capacity to meet demand since these would be high cost resources on the margin.
  • Use allocations to also avoid First-In issues to new technologies (set the rate at the project volume rate not the initial low volume rate) and to encourage transition off of expensive legacy technologies (Last out increases)
  • And lastly, and ensure your team knows and understands their services and their allocations and can articulate why what costs what they cost

With this framework and approach, you should be able to build and deliver an effective allocation mechanism that enables the corporation to avoid the overconsumption of free, common resources and properly direct the IT resources to where the best return for the corporation will be. Remember though that in the end this is an internal finance mechanism so the CFO should dictate the depth, level and allocation approach and you should ensure that the allocations mechanism does not become burdensome beyond its value. remember that allocations framework.

What have been your experiences with allocations frameworks? What changes or additions to these best practices would you add?

Best, Jim Ditmore

 

Evolving Metrics to Match Your Team’s Maturity

    Jim D

We have covered quite a bit of ground with previous posts on IT metrics but we have some important additions to the topic. The first, that we will cover today, is how to evolve your metrics to match your team’s maturity. (Next week, we will cover unit costs and allocations).

To ground our discussion, let’s first cover quickly the maturity levels of the team. Basing them heavily on the CMM, there are 5 levels:

  1. Ad hoc: A chaotic state with no established processes. Few measures are in place or accurate.
  2. Repeatable: The process is documented sufficiently and frequently used. Some measures are in place.
  3. Defined: Processes are defined and standard and highly adhered. Measures are routinely collected and analyzed.
  4. Managed: Processes are effectively controlled through the use of process metrics with some continuous process improvement (CPI).
  5. Optimized: Processes are optimized with statistical and CPI prevalent across all work.

It is important to match your IT metrics to the maturity of your team for several reasons:

  • capturing metrics which are beyond the team’s maturity level will be difficult to gather and likely lack accuracy
  • once gathered, there is potential for unreliable analysis and conclusions
  • and it will be unlikely that actions taken can result in sustained changes by the team
  • the difficulty and likely lack of progress and results can cause the team to negatively view any metrics or process improvement approach

Thus, before you start your team or organization on a metrics journey, ensure you understand their maturity so you can start the journey at the right place. If we take the primary activities of IT (production, projects, and routine services), you can map out the evolution of metrics by maturity as follows:

Production metrics – In moving from a low maturity environment to a high maturity, production metrics should evolve from typical inward-facing, component view measures of individual instances to customer view, service-oriented measures with both trend and pattern view as well and incident detail. Here is a detailed view:

Production Metrics Evolution

 

Project metrics – Measures in low maturity environments are project-centric usually focus on date and milestone with poor linkage to real work or quality. As the environment matures, more effective measures can be implemented that map actual work and quality as the work is being completed and provide accurate forecasts of project results. further, portfolio and program views and trends are available and leveraged.

Project Metrics Evolution

 

Routine Services – Low maturity measures are typically component or product-oriented at best within a strict SLA definition and lack a service view and customer satisfaction perspective. Higher maturity environments address these gaps and leverage unit costs, productivity, and unit quality within a context of business impact.

Routine Services Metrics Evolution

The general pattern is that as you move from low to medium and then to high maturity: you introduce process and service definition and accompanying metrics; you move from task or single project views to portfolio views; quality and value metrics are introduced and then exploited; and a customer or business value perspective becomes the prominent measure as to delivery success. Note that you cannot just jump to a high maturity approach as the level of discipline and understanding must be built over time with accumulating experience for the organization. To a degree, it is just like getting fit, you must go to the gym regularly and work hard – there is nothing in a bottle that will do it for you instead.

By matching the right level of metrics and proper next steps to your organization’s maturity, you will be rewarded with better delivery and higher quality, and your team will be able to progress and learn and leverage the next set of metrics. You will avoid a ‘bridge too far’ issue that often occurs when new leaders come into an organization that is less mature than their previous one, yet they impose the exact same regimen as they were familiar with previously. And then they fail to see why there are resultant problems and the blame either falls on the metrics framework imposed or the organization, when it is neither… it is the mismatch between the two.

And you will know your team has successfully completed their journey when they go from:

  • Production incidents to customer impact to ability to accurately forecast service quality
  • Production incidents to test defects to forecasted test defects to forecasted defects introduced to production
  • Unit counts of devices to package offerings to customer satisfaction
  • Unit counts or tasks to unit cost and performance measures to unit cost trajectories and performance trajectories

What has been your experience applying a metrics framework to a new organization? How have you adjusted it to ensure success with the new team?

Best, Jim Ditmore

Just about Time for Spring Break

    Jim D

It is just about time for spring break and given the significant number of new readers, I thought I would touch again on the key goals for this site and also touch on some posts and additions you may have missed.

I would also like to thank Steve Wignall for his contributions in the Service Desk arena. We now have 5 solid pages relating to all aspects of Service Desk and we are typically ranked in the top 20 searches in Google for a number of searches related to service desk (e.g., ‘service desk best practices’, etc). While I am quite pleased for us to achieve this in a matter of a few months, what is most important is that the content is useful and relevant and meaningful to IT leaders.

As many of you know, delivering IT today, with all of the cost reduction demands, the rapidly changing technology, the impact of IT consumerization, and security and risk demands, is, simply put, tough work. It is complicated and hard to get the complex IT mechanism, with all the usual legacy systems issues, to perform as well as the business requires. RecipesforIT has been built to help those IT leaders out, to provide recipes and ideas on how to tackle the tough but solvable problems they face. And in addition to providing best practices, we will give you a solid and sensible perspective on the latest trends and technologies.

And note we will continue to build out the best practices areas and not necessarily post the material. For example, we have added Build an Outstanding Customer Interface, Service Desk Leadership and Service Desk Metrics pages to the appropriate best practice areas. So don’t forget to leverage these areas for material when you are faced with issues or challenges.

As promised in January, we have really covered the service desk area with the help of Steve Wignall and Bob Barnes. And we covered innovation (and Kodak). There was also a request to cover how to effectively consolidate an IT organization and that was covered in  the post Building IT Synergy. 

So what is upcoming? I will continue to touch on current topics (hopefully you liked the Australian pilot and low PDI post) but I will also divert time to cover leadership and high performance teams. I have also received a request to cover production operations and best practices in that area that I hope to complete. Steve will also cover another page on service desk for us. And I will continue with incremental but hopefully material improvements to the site pages that will provide further details on best practices in a comprehensive manner.

I continue to receive strong feedback from many of you on the usefulness and actionability of the material. I will definitely work to ensure we maintain that relevance.

One last note: don’t forget you can subscribe to the site so you get an email when there’s a new post (subscribing is on the rightmost bar, halfway down the page). And feel free to provide comments or suggestions — the feedback really helps!

If you are new to the site, I recommend a few posts for relevance and fundamentals:

So, expect plenty more and enjoy your break and the warm weather!

Best, Jim Ditmore

Why you want an Australian Pilot: Lessons for Outstanding IT Leadership

    Jim D

Perhaps you are wondering what nationality or culture has to do with piloting an airplane? And how could piloting an airplane be similar to making decisions in an IT organization?

For those of you who have read Outliers, which I heartily recommend, you would be familiar with the well-supported conclusions that Malcolm Gladwell makes:

  • that incredible success often has strong parallels and patterns among those high achievers, often factors you would not expect or easily discern
  • and no one ever makes it alone

A very interesting chapter in Outliers is based on the NTSB analysis of what occurred in the cockpit during several crashes as well as the research work done by Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede. What Hofstede found in his studies for IBM HR department in the 70s and 80s is that people from different countries or cultures behave differently in their work relationships. Not surprising of course, and Hofstede did not place countries as right or wrong but used the data as a way to measure differences in cultures. A very interesting measure of culture is the Power Distance Index (PDI). Countries with a high PDI have cultures where those in authority are treated with great respect and deference. For countries with a low PDI, those in authority go to great lengths to downplay their stature and members feel comfortable challenging authority.

Now back to having an Australian pilot your plane: commercial aircraft, while highly automated and extremely reliable, are complex machines that when in difficult circumstances, require all of the crew to do their job well and in concert. But for multiple crashes in the 1990s and early 2000s, the NTSB found that crew communication and coordination were significant factors. And those airlines with crews from countries with high PDI scores, had the worst records. Why? As Malcolm Gladwell lays out so well, it is because of the repeated deference of lower status crew members to a captain who is piloting the plane. And when the captain makes repeated mistakes, these crew members defer and do not call vigorously call out the issues when it is their responsibility to do so even to fatal effect. So, if you were flying a plane in the 1990s, you would want your pilot to be from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, or the US, as they have the lowest PDI cultural score. Since that time, it is worth noting that most airlines with high PDI ratings have incorporated crew responsibility training to overcome these effects and all airlines have added further crew training on communications and interaction resulting in the continued improvement in safety we witnessed this past decade.

But this experience yields insight into how teams operate effectively in complex environments. Simply put, the highest performance teams are those with a low PDI that enables team members to provide appropriate input into a decision. Further, once the leader decides, with this input, the team rotates quickly and with confidence to take on the new tack. Elite teams in our armed forces operate on very similar principles.

I would suggest that high performance IT teams operate in a low PDI manner as well. Delivering an IT system in today’s large corporations requires integrating a dozen or more technologies to deliver features that require multiple experts to fully comprehend. In contrast, if you have the project or organization driven by a leader whose authoritative style imposes high deference by all team members and alternative views cannot be expressed, than it is simply a matter of time before poor performance will set in. Strong team members and experts will look elsewhere for employment as their voices are not heard, and at some point, one person cannot be an expert in everything required to succeed and delivery failure will occur. High PDI leaders will not result in sustainable high performance teams.

Now a low PDI culture does not suggest there is not structure and authority. Nor is the team a democracy. Instead, each team member knows their area of responsibility and understands that in difficult and complex situations, all must work together with flexibility to come up with ideas and options for the group to consider for the solution. Each member views their area as a critical responsibility and strives to be the best at their competency in a disciplined approach. Leaders solicit data, recommended courses and ideas from team members, and consider them fully. Discussion and constructive debate, if possible given the time and the urgency, are encouraged. Leaders then make clear decisions, and once decided, everyone falls in line and provides full support and commitment.

In many respects, this is a similar profile to the Level 5 leader that Jim Collins wrote about that mixes ‘a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They feature a lack of pretense (low PDI) but fierce resolve to get things done for the benefit of their company. Their modesty allows them to be approachable and ensures that the facts and expert opinions are heard. Their focus and resolve enables them to make clear decisions. And their dedication to the company and the organizations ensure the company goals are foremost. (Of course, they also have all the other personal and management strengths and qualities (intelligence, integrity, work ethic, etc.).)

Low PDI or Level 5 leaders set in place three key approaches for their organizations:

  • they set in place a clear vision and build momentum with sustained focus and energy, motivating and leveraging the entire team
  • they do not lurch from initiative to initiative or jump on the latest technology bandwagon, instead they judiciously invest in key technologies and capabilities that are core to their company’s competence and value and provide sustainable advantage
  • because they drive a fact-based, disciplined approach to decisioning as leaders, excessive hierarchy and bureaucracy are not required. Further, quality and forethought are built in to processes freeing the organization of excessive controls and verification.

To achieve a high performance IT organization, these are the same leadership qualities required. Someone who storms around and makes all the key decisions without input from the team will not achieve a high performance organization nor will someone who focuses only on technology baubles and not on the underlying capabilities and disciplines. And someone who shrinks from key decisions and turf battles and does not sponsor his team will fail as well. We have all worked for bosses that reflected these qualities so we understand what happens and  why there is a lack of enthusiasm in those organizations.

So, instead, resolve to be a level 5 leader, and look to lower your PDI. Set a compelling vision, and every day seek out the facts, press your team to know their area of expertise as top in the industry, and sponsor the dialogue that enables the best decisions, and then make them.

Best, Jim

The Accelerating Impact of the iPad on Corporate IT

    Jim D

Apple announced the iPad two years ago and began shipping in April 2010. In less than two years, the rapidity and scale of the shock to the PC marketplace from the iPad has been stunning.   The PC market trends in 2011 show PCs of all types (netbook, notebook, desktop) are being cannabilized by tablet sales. And iPad sales (15.4M in 4Q11) are now equivalent to PC desktop sales. We saw desktop PCs shipments slowing the last several years due to the earlier advent of notebooks and then netbooks, but now stagnating and even dropping in great part due to the iPad. With the release of the iPad 3 just around the corner (next week), these impacts will accelerate. And while the release of Windows 8 and new PC ultrabooks (basically PC versions of the MacBook Air) could possibly cause improved shipments in 2012, the implications of this consumer shift are significant for corporate technology.

Just as IT managers used to determine what mobile devices their employees used (and thus invariably Blackberry) and now companies are adopting a ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) approach to mobile, IT managers will need to shift to not just accommodating iPads as an additional mobile device, but should move to a full-fledged BYOD for client computing for their knowledge workers. Let them decide if they need a tablet, ultrabook, or laptop. Most front office staff will also be better served by a mobile or tablet approach (consider the retail staff in Apple’s stores today). Importantly, IT will need to develop applications first and second for the internet and tablets, and only for traditional PCs for back office and production workers.

The implications of this will cause further shock to the marketplace. Just as in the mobile device marketplace where the traditional consumer vendors were impacted first by the new smart phones **(i.e., Nokia impacted first by Apple and Android) and then the commercial mobile vendor** (Blackberry), PC vendors are now seeing their consumer divisions severely impacted with modest growth in commercial segments. But front office and knowledge workers will demand the use of tablets first and air books or ultrabooks second. Companies will make this shift because their employees will be more productive and satisfied and it will cost the company less. And as the ability to implement and leverage this BYOD approach increases, the migration will become a massive rush, especially as front office systems convert.  And the commercial PC segment will follow what already is happening in the broader consumer segment.

As an IT manager you should ensure your shop is on the front edge of this transition as much as possible to provide your company advantage. The tools to deploy, manage, and implement secure sessions are rapidly maturing and are already well-proven **. Many companies started pilots or small implementations in that past year in such areas as providing iPads instead of 5 inch thick binders for their boards ** or giving senior executives iPads to use in meetings instead of printed presentations. But the big expansion has been allowing senior managers and knowledge workers to begin accessing corporate email and intranets via their own iPads from home or when traveling. And with the success of these pilots, companies are planning broader rollouts and are adopting formal BYOD policies for laptops and pads.

So how do you ensure that your company stays abreast of these changes? If you have not already piloted corporate email and intranet access from smart phones and pads, get going. Look also to pilot the devices for select groups such as your board and senior executives. This will enable you to get the support infrastructure in place and issues worked out before a larger rollout.

Work with your legal and procurement team to define the new corporate policy on employee devices. Many companies help solve this issue by providing the employee a voucher covering the cost of the device purchase but the employee is the owner. And because the corporate data is held in a secure partition on the device and can be wiped clean if lost or stolen, you can meet your corporate IT security standards.

More importantly, IT must adjust its thinking about what the most vital interface is for internal applications. For more than a decade, it has been the PC with perhaps an internet interface. Going forward, it needs to be an internet interface, possibly with a smartphone and iPad app. Corporate PC client interfaces (outside of dedicated production applications such as the general ledger for the finance team or a call center support application) will be one of casualties of this shift from PCs.

If you are looking for leaders in the effort, I would suggest that government agencies, especially in the US, have been surprisingly agile in delivering their reference works for everything from the state legal code to driving rules and regulations on iPad applications in the Itunes store. I actually think the corporate sector is trailing the government in this adoption. How many of you actually have their HR policies and procedures in an iPad application that can be downloaded? Or a smart phone app to handle your corporate travel expenses? Or a front office application that enables your customer facing personnel to be as mobile and productive as an Apple retail employee?

And ensure you build the infrastructure to handle the download and version management of these new applications. You can configure your own corporate version of a iTunes store  that enables users to self-provision and easily download apps to their devices just as they download Angry Birds today. This again will provide a better experience for the corporate user at reduced cost. And the leading senior infrastructure client managers today are looking to further exploit this corporate store and later extend this infrastructure and download approach to all their devices. This is just another example of a product or approach, first developed for the consumer market, cross-impacting the commercial market.

As for those desktop PCs, where will they be in 2 to 3 years? They will still be used by production workers (call centers, back office personnel, etc) but they will be more and more virtualized so the heavy computing is done in the data center and not the PC. And desktop PCs  will be a much smaller proportion of your overall client devices. This will have significant implications on your client software licenses (e.g. Windows Office, etc) and you should begin considering now how your contracts will handle this changing situation.  And perhaps just beyond that timeframe, it is possible that we will consider traditional desktops to be similar to floppy drives today — an odd bit of technology from the past.

Best, Jim Ditmore

* for those of you who read my occasional post on InformationWeek, I have updated my article that was originally posted there on Feb 14.

 

Metrics Roundup: Key Techniques and References

    Jim D

As an IT leader either of a function or of a large IT team with multiple functions, what is the emphasis you should place on metrics and how are you able to leverage them to attain improvement and achieve more predictable delivery? What other foundational elements must be in place for you to effectively leverage the metrics? Which metrics are key measures or leading indicators and which ones are lagging or less relevant?

For those of you just joining, this is the fourth post on metrics and in our previous posts we focused on key aspects of IT metrics (transparency, benchmarking, and a scientific approach). You can find these posts in the archives or, better yet, in the pages linked under the home page menu of Best Practices. The intent of the RecipeforIT blog is to provide IT leaders with useful, actionable practices, techniques and guidance to be more successful IT leaders and enable their shops to achieve much higher performance. I plan to cover most of the key practices for IT leaders in my posts, and as a topic is covered, I try to migrate the material into Best Practices pages. So, now back to metrics.

In essence there are three types of relevant metrics:

  • operational or primary metrics – those metrics used to monitor, track and decision the daily or core work. Operational metrics are the base of effective management and are the fundamental measures of the activity being done. It is important that these metrics are collected inherently as part of the activity and best if the operational team  collects, understands and changes their direction based on these metrics.
  • verification or secondary metrics – those metrics used to verify that the work completed meets standards or is functioning as designed. Verification metrics should also be collected and reviewed by the same operational team though potentially by different members of the team or as participation as part of a broader activity (e.g. DR test). Verification metrics provide an additional measure of either overall quality or critical activity effectiveness.
  • performance or tertiary metrics – those metrics that provide insight as to the performance of the function or activity. Performance metrics enable insight as to the team’s efficiency, timeliness, and effectiveness.

Of course, your metrics for a particular function should consist of those measures needed to successfully execute and manage the function as well as those measures that demonstrate progress towards the goals of your organization. For example, let’s take am infrastructure function: server management. What operational metrics should be in place? What should be verified on a regular basis? And what performance metrics should we have? While this will vary based on the maturity, scale, and complexity of the server team and environment, here is a good subset:

Operational Metrics:

  • Server asset counts (by type, by OS, by age, location, business unit, etc) and server configurations by version (n, n-1, n-2, etc) or virtualized/non-virtual and if EOL or obsolete
  • Individual, grouped and overall server utilization, performance, etc by component (CPU, memory, etc)
  • Server incidents, availability, customer impacts by time period, trended with root cause and chronic or repeat issues areas identified
  • Server delivery time, server upgrade cycle time
  • Server cost overall and by type of server, by cost area (admin, maintenance, HW, etc) and cost by vendor
  • Server backup attempt and completion, server failover in place, etc

Verification metrics:

  • Monthly sample of the configuration management database server records for accuracy and completeness, Ongoing scan of network for servers not in the configuration management database, Regular reporting of all obsolete server configs with callouts on those exceeding planned service or refresh dates
  • Customer transaction times, Regular (every six months) capacity planning and performance reviews of critical business service stacks including servers
  • Root cause review of all significant impacting customer events, auto-detection of server issues versus manual or user detection ratios
  • DR Tests, server privileged access and log reviews, regular monthly server recovery or failover tests (for a sample)

Performance metrics:

  • Level of standardization or virtualization, level of currency/obsolescence
  • Level of customer impact availability, customer satisfaction with performance, amount of headroom to handle business growth
  • Administrators per server, Cost per server, Cost per business transaction
  • Server delivery time, man hours required to deliver a server

Obviously, if you are just setting out, you will collect on some of these metrics first. As you incorporate their collection and automate the work and reporting associated with them you can then tackle the additional metrics. And you will vary them according to the importance of different elements in your shop. If cost is critical, then reporting on cost and efficiency plays such as virtualization will naturally be more important. If time to market or availability are critical, than those elements should receive greater focus. Below is a diagram that reflects the construct of the three types of metrics and their relationship to the different metrics areas and score cards:

Metrics Framework

So, you have your metrics framework, what else is required to be successful leveraging the metrics?

First and foremost, the culture of your team must be open to alternate views and support healthy debate. Otherwise, no amount of data (metrics) or facts will enable the team to change directions from the party line. If you and your management team do not lead regular, fact-based discussions where course can be altered and different alternatives considered based on the facts and the results, you likely do not have the openness needed for this approach to be successful. Consider leading by example here and emphasize fact based discussions and decisions.

Also you must have defined processes that are generally adhered. If your group’s work is heavily ad hoc and different each time, measuring what happened the last time will not yield any benefits. If this is the case, you need to first focus on defining even at a high level, the major IT processes and help your team’s adopt them. Then you can proceed to metrics and the benefits they will accrue.

Accountability, sponsorship and the willingness to invest in the improvement activities are also key factors in the speed and scope of the improvements that can occur. As a leader you need to maintain a personal engagement in the metrics reviews and score card results. They should into your team’s goals and you should monitor the progress in key areas. Your sponsorship and senior business sponsorship where appropriate will be major accelerators to progress. And hold teams accountable for their results and improvements within their domain.

How does this correlate with your experience with metrics? Any server managers out there that would have suggestions on the server metrics? I expect we will have two further posts on metrics:

  • a post on how to evolve the metrics you measure as you increase the maturity and capability of your team,
  • and one on unit costing and allocations

I look forward to your suggestions.

Best, Jim

 

A Scientific Approach to IT Metrics

    Jim D

In order to achieve a world class or first quartile performance, it is critical to take a ‘scientific’ approach to IT metrics. Many shops remain rooted in ‘craft’ approaches to IT where techniques and processes are applied in an ad hoc manner to the work at hand and little is measured. Or, a smattering of process improvement methodologies (such as Six Sigma or Lean) or development approaches (e.g., Agile) are applied indiscriminately across the organization. Frequently then, due to a lack of success, the process methods or metrics focus are then tarred as being ineffective by managers.

Most organizations that I have seen that were mediocre performers typically have such craft or ad hoc approaches to their metrics and processes. And this includes not just the approach at the senior management level but at each of the 20 to 35 distinct functions that make up an IT shop (e.g., Networking, mainframes, servers, desktops, service desk, middleware , etc, and each business-focused area of development and integration). In fact, you must address the process and metrics at each distinct function level in order to then build a strong CIO level process, governance and metrics. And if you want to achieve 1st quartile or world-class performance, a scientific approach to metrics will make a major contribution. So let’s map out how to get to such an approach.

1) Evaluate your current metrics: You can pick several of the current functions you are responsible for and evaluate them to see where you are in your metrics approach and how to adjust to apply best practices. Take the following steps:

  • For each distinct function, identify the current metrics that are routinely used by the team to execute their work or make decisions.
  • Categorize these metrics as either operational metrics or reporting numbers. If they are not used by the team to do their daily work or they are not used routinely to make decisions on the work being done by the team, then these are reporting numbers. For example, they may be summary numbers reported to middle management or reported for audit or risk requirements or even for a legacy report that no one remembers why it is being produced.
  • Is a scorecard being produced for the function? An effective scorecard would have quantitative measures for the deliverables of the functions as well as objective scores for function goals that have been properly cascaded for the overall IT goals

2) Identify gaps with the current metrics: For each of IT functions there should be regular operational metrics for all key dimensions of delivery (quality, availability, cost, delivery against SLAs, schedule). Further, each area should have unit measures to enable an understanding of performance (e.g., unit cost, defects per unit, productivity, etc). As an example, the server team should have the following operational metrics:

    • all server asset inventory and demand volumes maintained and updated
    • operational metrics such as server availability, server configuration currency, server backups, server utilization should all be tracked
    • also time to deliver a server, total server costs, and delivery against performance and availability SLAs should be tracked
    • further secondary or verifying metrics such as server change success, server obsolescense, servers with multiple backup failures, chronic SLA or availability misses, etc should be tracked as well
    • function performance metrics should include cost per server (by type of server), administrators per server, administrator hours to build a server, percent virtualized servers, percent standardized servers, etc should also be derived

3) Establish full coverage: By comparing the existing metrics against the full set of delivery goals, you can quickly establish the appropriate operational metrics along with appropriate verifying metrics. Where there are metrics missing that should be gathered, work with the function to incorporate the additional metrics into their daily operational work and processes. Take care to work from the base metrics up to more advanced:

    • start with base metrics such as asset inventories and staff numbers and overall costs before you move to unit costs and productivity and other derived metrics
    • ensure the metrics are gathered in as automated a fashion as possible and as an inherent part of the overall work (they should not be gathered by a separate team or subsequent to the work being done

Ensure that verifying metrics are established for critical performance areas for the function as well. An example of this for the server function could be for the key activity of backups for a server:

    • the operational metrics would be perhaps backups completed against backups scheduled
    • the verifying metric would be twofold:
      • any backups for a single server that fail twice in a row get an alert and an engineering review as to why they failed (typically, for a variety of reasons 1% or fewer of your backups will fail, this is reasonable operational performance. But is one server does not get a successful backup for many days, you are likely putting the firm at risk if there is a database or disk failure, thus the critical alert)
      • every month or quarter, 3 or more backups are selected at random, and the team ensures they can successfully recover from the backup files. This will verify everything associated with the backup is actually working.

4) Collect the metrics only once: Often, teams collect similar metrics for different audiences. The metrics that they use to monitor for example configuration currency or configuration to standards, can be mostly duplicated by risk data collected against security parameter settings or executive management data on a percent server virtualization. This is a waste of the operational team’s time and can lead to confusing reports where one view doesn’t match another view. I recommend that you establish and overall metrics framework that includes risk and quality metrics as well as management and operational metrics so that all groups agree to the proper metrics. The metrics are then collected once, distilled and analyzed once, and congruent decisions can then be made by all groups. Later this week I will post a recommended metrics framework for a typical IT shop.

5) Drop the non-value numbers activity: For all those numbers that were identified as being gathered for middle management reports or for legacy reports with an uncertain audience; if there is no tie to a corporate or group goal, and the numbers are not being used by the function for operational purposes, I recommend to stop collecting the numbers and stop publishing any associated reports. It is non-value activity.

6) Use the metrics in regular review: At both the function team level and function management level the metrics should be trended, analyzed and discussed. These should be regular activities: monthly, weekly, and even daily depending on the metrics. The focus should be on how to improve, and based on the trends are current actions, staffing, processes, etc, enabling the team to improve and be successful on all goals or not. A clear feedback loop should be in place to enable the team and management to identify actions to take place to correct issues apparent through the metrics as quickly and as locally as possible. This gives control of the line to the team and the end result is better solutions, better work and better quality. This is what has been found in manufacturing time and again and is widely practiced by companies such as Toyota in their factories.

7) Summarize the metrics from across your functions into a scorecard: Ensure you identify the key metrics within each function and properly summarize and aggregate the metrics into an overall group score card. Obviously the score card should match you goals and key services that you deliver. It may be appropriate to rotate in key metrics from a function based on visibility or significant change. For example, if you are looking to improve overall time to market(TTM) of your projects, it may be appropriate to report on server delivery time as a key subcomponent and hopefully leading indicator of your improving TTM.  Including on your score card, even at a summarized level, key metrics from the various functions, will result in greater attention and pride being taken in the work since there is a very visible and direct consequences. I also recommend that on a quarterly basis, that you provide an assessment as to the progress and perhaps highlights of the team’s work as reflected in the score card.

8 ) Drive better results through proactive planning: The team and function management, once the metrics and feedback loop are in place, will be able to drive better performance through ongoing improvement as part of their regular activity. Greater increases in performance may require broader analysis and senior management support. Senior management should do proactive planning sessions with the function team to enable greater improvement to occur. The assignment for the team should be how take key metrics and what would be required to set them on a trajectory to a first quartile level in a certain time frame. For example, you may have both a cost reduction goal overall and within the server function there is a subgoal to achieve greater productivity (at a first quartile level)  and reduce the need for additional staff. By asking the team to map out what is required and by holding a proactive planning session on some of the key metrics (e.g. productivity) you will often identify the path to meet both local objectives that also contribute to the global objectives. Here, in the server example, you may find that with a moderate investment in automation, productivity can be greatly improved and staff costs reduced substantially. Thus both objectives could be obtained by the investment.  By holding such proactive sessions, where you ask the team to try and identify what would needs to be done to achieve a trajectory on their key metrics as well as considering what are the key goals and focus at the corporate or group level, you can often identify such doubly beneficial actions.

By taking these steps, you will employ a scientific approach to your metrics. If you add a degree of process definition and maturity, you will make significant strides to controlling and improving your environment in a sustainable way. This will build momentum and enable your team to enter a virtuous cycle of improvement and better performance. And then if add to the mix process improvement techniques (in moderation and with the right technique for each process and group), you will accelerate your improvement and results.

But start with your metrics and take a scientific approach. In the next week, I will be providing metrics frameworks that have stood well in large, complex shops along with templates that should help the understanding and application of the approach.

What metrics approaches have worked well for you? What keys would you add to this approach? What would you change?

Best, Jim

IT Service Desk: Building a Responsive and Effective Desk

    Steve Wignall

This is the 4th in a series of posts on best practices in the IT Service Desk arena. To catch the previous material, you can check out the first post or you can read through the best practice reference pages on the the IT Recipes site. To help you best use this site, please know that as material is covered in the posts, we subsequently use it to properly build an ongoing reference area that can be used when you encounter a particular issue or problem area and are looking for how to solve it. There’s a good base of material in the reference area on efficiency and cost cutting, project management, recruiting talent, benchmarking, and now service desk. If you have any feedback on how to improve the reference area structure, don’t hesitate to let us know. We will be delivering one more post on service desk after this one and then I will be shifting to leadership techniques and building high performance teams.

One of the key challenges of the Service Desk is to respond to a customer transaction in a timely manner. Often, two situations occur: either efficiency or budget restrictions result in lengthened service times and poor perception of the service or the focus is purely on speed to answer and the initial interaction is positive but the end result is not highly effective. Meeting the customer expectations on timeliness, being cost effective, and delivering real value is the optimal performance that is our target.

Further, this optimal performance must be delivered in a complex environment. Timeliness must be handled differently for each activity (for example, the service for a significant production incident or service loss is handled as a ‘live’ telephone call, whereas an order for new equipment would be primarily submitted via a web form). The demand for the services is often 24 hours a day and global with multiple languages and interaction occurs over phone, web chat, and intranet (and soon, mobile app interfaces). This optimal performance should have both the cost and the effectiveness of the service desk measured holistically, that is, all the costs to deliver a service should be totaled including the end user and customer cost (e.g., wait time, restoration time, lost revenue opportunity, etc) and engineering time (e.g., time required to go back a gather data to deliver a service or time avoided if service is automated or handled by the service desk).

A great Service Desk not only delivers the operational numbers, it ensures that the workload flowing through the process is ‘value add’ activity that is required and necessary. The Service Desk must ensure that it measures performance as a cost / benefit to the whole organisation and not just in isolation. Doing the ‘right thing’ may actually move the narrower operational Service Desk metrics in the wrong direction; yet at the enterprise level it remains the right thing to do.

Optimize your service desk by managing demand and improving productivity

There are two primary factors that drive your service desk cost and delivery:

  • the number of calls and in particular the peak volume of calls, and,
  • the cost base of your service desk (mostly people costs: salary, benefits, taxes, etc

The volume and pattern of transaction demand is in turn the primary driver of the number of people required and is the key determinant of the overall cost base of the Service Desk. More specifically, the peak load of the Service Desk (the time at which call volumes are highest) is the time that drives your peak staffing volume and is therefore the most important target of demand reduction (i.e. the point that reductions in call / transaction volume are most likely to be realised as a financial cost saving or improved responsiveness to customers).

There are three key opportunities:

  • Mange the transaction volume
  • Manage the transaction pattern
  • Manage the transaction time

And in each opportunity area, we will look to apply best practices such that we improve the effectiveness of the service desk and IT experience overall.

Managing the Transaction Volume

Reducing the overall volume of transactions presented to the department reduces total workload. And while reducing the number of transactions is a good thing, these reductions may not be realised as cost savings or reduced customer wait times if they simply increase idle time during your quieter periods and do not reduce the peak load. The peak load is the point at which resourcing levels are at their highest and yet you are likely to have negative capacity (i.e. your customers will queue as you cannot resource fully to meet the peak). Eradicating demand even within troughs is valuable; however the true value is to focus on the peak. So start by identifying your key volume drivers and your peak load key volume drivers through statistical analysis. The use of Pareto analysis will usually demonstrate that a significant volume of your calls (+80%) are driven by a fairly small number of categories of call, sometimes the top 15 / 20 call types can account for as much as 80% of the total volume of calls. Then, for each call type impacting the peak, do the following analysis and actions:

  • Is it a chronic issue — meaning, is it a repetitive problem that users experience (i.e. Citrix is down every Monday morning, or new users are issued the wrong configuration to properly access data, etc)? If it is, then rank by frequency, missed SLAs and total cost (e.g. 200 users a week with the issue costing 2 hours of lost time is a $32,000/month problem). Allocate the investment based on SLA criticality and ROI and assign it to the appropriate engineering area to address with signoff by the service desk required when completed.
  • Is it a navigation or training issue? Having significant numbers of users call the service desk as a last resort to find out how to do something is an indicator that your systems or your intranet is not user friendly, intuitive or well-designed. Use these calls to drive navigation and design improvements for your systems and your intranet in each release cycle. Look to make it a normal input to improve usability of your systems.
  • Is it that requests can only be handled manually? As I have mentioned in previous posts, often the internal systems for employees (e.g. HR, Finance and IT) are the least automated and have manual forms and workflow. Look to migrate as much as possible to a self-serve, highly automated workflow approach. This particularly true for password administration. Unless you have full logical access automation, it is likely that User Administration and Password Management are key call drivers, particularly at peak as users arrive at work and attempt to log on to systems. Automation of password resets at an application / platform level is often achievable quickly and at a much lower cost than a fully integrated solution. Assign to your engineering and development teams so you can make significant peak load demand reductions with little or no investment and corresponding user experience improvement.
  • Can you automate or standardize? If you cannot automate then look to standardise wherever possible. For example, have the Service Desk work in partnership with your IT Security group and ensure that you adopt a corporate standard construction for passwords and log on credentials. This will result in users being less likely to lock themselves out of their accounts and reduce the peak load. And ensure the standards don’t go overboard on security. I once had a group where the passwords were changed for everyone every month. The result was 20,000 additional calls to the service desk because people forgot their passwords, and lax security because nearly everyone else was writing down their passwords. We changed it back to quarterly and saved $400,000 a quarter in reduced calls and made the users happy (and improved security).
  • Can you eliminate calls due to misdirection? Identify failure demand which are calls that are generated by weaknesses in the design or performance of support processes, including: wrong department / misdirected calls (or IVR choices), use of the Service Desk as a ‘Directory Enquiries’ function, repeat calls and chaser calls (i.e. where the customer hasn’t been able to provide all of the required details in one call or had to chase because their expectations have not been met). Failure demand should be eradicated through the re-design of support processes / services to eliminate multiple steps and common defects as well as improved customer communication and education.
  • Can you increase self service? Identify calls that could be resolved without the intervention of the Service Desk, i.e. through the use of alternative channels such as self service. Work with business lines and gain agreement to direct callers to the alternative (cheaper) channels. To encourage adoption, market the best channels and where necessary withdraw the services of the Service Desk to mandate the use of automation or self service solutions.
  • Is root cause addressed by the engineering teams? Undertake robust Problem Management processes and ensure that your engineering and application groups have clear accountabilities to resolve root cause issues and thus reduce the volume of calls into the Service Desk. A good way to secure buy in is to convert the call volumes into a financial figure and ensure the component management team has full awareness and responsibility to reduce these costs they are causing.
  • Can you streamline your online or intranet ticket creation and logging process? Organizations increasingly want to capture management information about technical faults that were fixed locally and it is not uncommon for business lines to request that a ticket is logged  just for management information purposes. Design your online ticket logging facility to be able to handle all of these transactions. Whilst such information is valuable, the Service Desk agent adds no value through their involvement in the transaction.
  • Do you have routing transactions that can have their entry easily automated?Consider reviewing operating procedures and identifying those transactions in which your agents undertake ‘check list’ style diagnosis before passing a ticket to resolver groups. In these instances, creating web forms (or templates within your Service Management toolset) enables the customer to answer the check list directly, raise their own ticket and then route directly to support.

Managing the Transaction Pattern

If workload cannot be eradicated (i.e. it is value-added work that must be done by the agent) then we next look to shift the work from peak to non-peak service times. Delivering service ‘at the point of peak customer demand’ is the most expensive way to deliver service as it increases the resource profile required and could build in high levels of latent non-productive time for your agents.

One technique to apply to shift the work from peak to non-peak is through customer choice. Leverage your IVR or your online self service ticketing systems to enable the customer to choose a call back option at non-peak times if they call in at peak. Many customer would prefer to  to select a specific time of service with certainty versus waiting an indeterminate amount of time for an agent. They can structure their workday productively around the issue. But you must ensure your team reliably calls back at the specified time.

Customer education around busy and quiet periods to call, messages on your IVR and even limiting some non-essential services to only being available during low demand hours will all help to smooth workflow and reduce the peak load. Further, providing a real-time systems production status toolbar on the intranet will minimize repeat call-ins for the same incident or status query calls.

You can also smooth or shift calls due to system releases and upgrades. Ensure that your releases and rollouts are scheduled at the with peak times in mind. A major rollout of a new system at the end of the month on a Monday morning when the service desk experiences a peak and there are other capacity stresses is just not well-planned.  Userids, passwords, and training should all be staged incrementally for a rollout to smooth demand and provide a better system introduction and resulting user experience. As a general rule doing a pilot implementation to gauge true user interaction (and resulting likely calls) is a good approach to identifying potential hotspots before wide introduction and fixing them.

Managing the Transaction Time

Transaction time can be improved in two ways:

  • improve the productivity and skill of the agent (or reduce the work to be done)
  • increase the resources to meet the demand thus reducing the wait time for the transactions.

Start by ensuring your hiring practices are bringing onboard agents with the right skills (technical, customer interface, problem-solving, and languages). Encourage agents to improve their skills through education and certification programs. Have your engineering teams provide periodic seminars on the systems of your firm and how they work. Ensure the service desk team is trained as part of every major new system release or upgrade.  Implement a knowledge management system that is initially written jointly by the engineering team and the service desk team. Enables comments and updates and hints to be added by your service desk agents. Ensure the taxonomy of the problems set is logical and easily navigated. And then ensure the knowledge base and operational documentation is updated for every major system release.

Another method to improve the productivity of your service desk is to capture the service and transaction data by the various service desk subteams (e.g., by region or shift, etc). There will be variation across the subteams, and you can use these variations to pinpoint potential best practices. Identifying and implementing best practice across your desk should lead to a convergence over time of call duration to an optimal number. Measuring the mean average and the standard deviation around the mean should demonstrate convergence over time if best practice is being embedded and used consistently across the workforce. Remember that just having the lowest service time per call may not be the optimal practice. Taking a bit longer on the call and delivering a higher rate of first call resolution is often a more optimal path.  Your agents with the longest call duration may be fixing more transactions; however it could be that some of these are too time consuming and should have been time-shifted as other customers are now being left to queue.

Managing transaction time has to be done very purposefully; otherwise quality is placed at risk. If agents believe they are under pressure to meet a certain transaction time, they will sacrifice quality to do so. This will result in re-work, reduced volumes of calls resolved at first point of contact and reduced customer satisfaction as they will receive inconsistent and reduced service. Transaction time has to be managed as a secondary measure to quality and resolution rates to prevent this from occurring. There should never be a stated deadline as to when a call has become too lengthy – each customer interaction has to be managed on its own merits and only in the aggregate (say a weekly or monthly average) can you fairly compare the delivery of your agents against each other.

Resource planning is the science of matching your supply of resources to meet the demand from the customer within a specified period of time (let’s say 20 seconds). Call Centres will usually manage their resource profile in 15 minute intervals. The mechanics of doing this is driven by probability – the probability of a call being presented within a 15 minute period (predicted using historical data gathered from your telephony) and the probability that an agent will become available within 20 seconds of the call being presented to answer that call. The ‘magic number’ of agents required in a 15 minute period is met when these probabilities are aligned so that we will meet the required level of service (e.g. 90% of calls will be answered in 20 seconds).

The volume of calls presented is one half of this equation, the frequency with which an agent becomes available is the other. Agents become available when they join the pool of active agents (i.e. when they sign in for a shift) or when they complete a call and are ready to receive the next call. The average transaction time (call length plus any additional time placing the agent in an unavailable state) determines how frequently they will become available in any given 15 minute period. A Call Centre with an average call duration of 2 ½ minutes will have each agent becoming available 6 times in a 15 minute period, whereas a call duration of 6 minutes will only have each agent becoming available 2 ½ times. The probability of an agent becoming available within the 20 second window in the first call centre is significantly higher and their resource requirements will therefore be much lower than the second. The right number for your business will be for you to determine. Then apply the best practice staffing approaches mentioned in our earlier posts. Recruit a talented team in the right locations and look to leverage part-time staff to help fulfill peak demand.

Here are a few best practice techniques for you to consider in managing the Transaction Time:

  • When calculating transaction time, ensure that you include not only the length of active talk time but also any other factor that makes the agent unavailable for the next call to be presented (e.g. any rest time that you have built into the telephony, any ‘wrap up’ time that the agent can manually apply to block other calls being presented etc…).
  • Present calls direct to agent headsets (i.e. a beep in the ear) rather than have their phones ring and require manually answering.
  • Analyse what the difference is between your best and worst performing agents, determine what best practice is and roll it out across the team. This may include everyone having access to the right applications on their desktop, having the right shortcuts loaded in their browsers, keeping high volume applications open rather than logging in when a relevant call is presented and a thousand other nuances that all add up to valuable seconds on a call.
  • Do a key stroke by key stroke analysis of how your agents use the Service Management toolset. Manage the logical workflow of a ticket, automate fields where possible, build templates to assist quick information capture and ensure that there is no wasted effort (i.e. that every key stroke counts). Ensure that support groups are not inflating call duration by requesting fields that are re-keyed in tickets for their own convenience.
  • Invest in developing professional coaching skills for your Team Leaders (you may even want to consider dedicated performance coaches) and embed call duration as an important element in your quality management processes. (Focusing on the length of call being right and appropriate for the circumstances and not just short). Coach staff through direct observation and at the time feedback.
  • Ensure that your performance metrics and rewards are aligned so that you reward quality delivery and your people have a clear understanding of the behaviours that you are driving. Ensure that performance is reviewed against the suite of measures (resolution, duration, quality sampling etc…) and not in isolation.
  • Build your checks and measures to keep the process honest. Measure and manage each element of the process to ensure that the numbers are not being manipulated by differences in agent behaviour. Run and check reports against short calls, agent log in / log out, abandoned calls and terminated calls. How agents use these statuses can fundamentally change their individual performance metrics and so it is the role of leaders to ensure that the playing field is level and that the process is not being subverted through negative behaviors.

On a final note on resource planning, if you have more than once central desk, look to consolidate your service desks. If you have different desks for different technologies or business areas, consolidating them will invariable lower cost and actually improve service. The economies of scale in call centers are very material, Further size and scale make it easier to run a Call Center that consistently deliver the quality, call response time and benchmarks favorable to the external market. Don’t let technology or business divisions sub-optimize this enterprise utility.

Effectively resourcing a Service Desk is about the application and manipulation of the laws of supply and demand. The Service Desk is not a passive victim of these forces and great Service Desks will be heavily focused on maximising the productivity, efficiency and effectiveness of the supply of labour. They will equally be managing their demand profile to ensure that all work is required and value add, workflow is managed to smooth demand away from peaks and that customers needs are satisfied through the most effective and efficient channels to deliver exceptional customer service.

We look forward to your thoughts or additions to these best practices for service desk.

Best, Steve and Jim

Moving from IT Silos to IT Synergy

    Jim D

We will revisit the Service Desk best practices this weekend as we have several additions ready to go, but I wanted to cover how you, as an IT leader, can bring about much greater synergy within your IT organization. In many IT shops, and some that I found when I first arrived at a company, the IT is ‘siloed’ or separate into different divisions, with typically each division supporting a different business line. Inevitability there are frustrations with this approach, and they are particularly acute when a customer is served by two or more lines of business. How should you approach this situation as a leader and what are the best steps to take to improve IT’s delivery?

I think it is best first to understand what are the drivers for variations in IT organizations under large corporations. With that understanding we can then work out the best IT organizational and structural models to serve them. There are two primary sets of business drivers:

  • those drivers that require IT to be closer to the business unit such as:
    • improving market and business knowledge,
    • achieving faster time-to-market (TTM),
    • and the ability to be closer in step and under control of the business leads of each division
  • those drivers that require IT to be more consolidated such as:
    • achieving greater efficiencies,
    • attaining a more holistic view of the customers,
    • delivering greater consistency and quality
    • providing greater scale and lower comprehensive risk

So, with these legitimate pushes, in two different directions, there is always a conflict in how IT should be organized. In some organizations, the history has been two or three years of being decentralized to enable IT to be more responsive to the business, and then, after costs are out of control, or risk is problematic, a new CFO, COO, or CEO comes in and  IT is re-centralized. This pendulum swing back and forth, is not conducive to a high performance team, as IT senior staff either hunker down to avoid conflict, or play politics to be on the next ‘winning’ side. Further, given that business organizations have a typical life span of 3 to 4 years (or less) before being re-organized again, corollary changes in IT to match the prevailing business organization then cause havoc with IT systems and structures that have 10 or 20 year life spans. Moreover, implementing a full business applications suite and supporting business processes takes at least 3 years for decent-sized business division, so if organizations change in the interim, then much valuable investment is lost.

So it is best to design an IT organization and systems approach that meets both sets of drivers and anticipates that business organizational change will happen. The best solution for meeting both sets of drivers is to organize IT as a ‘hybrid‘ organization. In other words, some portions of IT should be organized to deliver scale, efficiency, and high quality, while others should be organized to deliver time to market, and market feature and innovation.

The functions that should be consolidated and organized centrally to deliver scale, efficiency and quality should include:

  • Infrastructure areas, especially networks, data centers, servers and storage
  • Information security
  • Field support
  • Service desk
  • IT operations and IT production processes and tools

These functions should then be run as a ‘utility’ for the corporation. There should be allocation mechanisms in place to ensure proper usage and adequate investment in these key foundational elements. Every major service the utility delivers should be benchmarked at least every 18 months against industry to ensure delivery is at top quartile levels and best practices are adopted. And the utility teams should be relentlessly focused on continuous improvement with strong quality and risk practices in place.

The functions that should be aligned and organized along business lines to deliver time to market, market feature and innovation should include:

  • Application development areas
  • Internet and mobile applications
  • Data marts, data reporting, and data analysis

These functions should be held accountable for high quality delivery. Effective release cycles should be in place to enable high utilization of the ‘build factory’ as well as a continuous cycle of feature delivery. These functions should be compared and marked against each other to ensure best practices are adopted and performance is improved.

And those functions which can be organized flexibly in either mode would be:

  • Database
  • Middleware
  • Testing
  • Applications Maintenance
  • Data Warehousing
  • Project Management
  • Architecture

For these functions that can centralized or organized along business lines, it is possible to organize in a variety of ways. For example, systems integration testing could be centralized and unit test and system testing could be allocated by business line application team. Or, data base could have physical design and administration centralized and logical design and administration allocated by application team. There are some critical elements that should be singular or consolidated, including:

  • if architecture is not centralized, there must be architecture council reporting to the CIO with final design authority
  • there should be one set of project methodologies, tools, and process for all project managers
  • there should be one data architecture team
  • there should be one data warehouse physical design and infrastructure team

In essence, as the services are more commodity, or there is critical advantage to have a single solution (e.g. one view of the customer for the entire corporation) then you should establish a single team to be responsible for that service. And where you are looking for greater speed or better market knowledge, then organize IT into smaller teams closer to the business (but still with technical fiduciary accountabilities back to the CIO).

With this hybrid organization, as outlined in the diagram, you will be able to deliver the best of both worlds: outstanding utility services that provide cost and quality advantage and business-aligned services that provide TTM and market feature and innovation. .

As CIO, you should look to optimize your organization using the ‘hybrid’ structure. If you are currently entirely siloed, then start the journey by making the business case for the most commodity of functions: networks, service desks, and data centers. It will be less costly, and there will be more capability and lower risk if these are integrated. As you successfully complete integration of these area, you can move up the chain to IT Operations, storage, and servers. As these areas are pooled and consolidated you should be able to release excess capacity and overheads while providing more scale and better capabilities. Another area to start could be to deliver a complete view of the customer across the corporation. This requires a single data architecture, good data stewardship by the business, and a consolidated data warehouse approach. Again, as functions are successfully consolidated, the next layer up can be addressed.

Similarly, if you are highly centralized, it will be difficult to maintain pace with multiple business units. It is often better to divest some level of integration to achieve a faster TTM or better business unit support. Pilot an application or integration team in those business areas where innovation and TTM are most important or business complexity is highest. Maintain good oversight but also provide the freedom for the groups to perform in their new accountabilities.

And realize that you can dial up or down the level of integration within the hybrid model.  Obviously you would not want to decentralize commodity functions like the network or centralize all application work, but there is the opportunity to vary intermediate functions to meet the business needs. And by staying within the hybrid framework, you can deliver to the business needs without careening from a fully centralized to a decentralized model every three to five years and all the damage that such change causes to the IT team and systems.

There are additional variations that can be made to the model to accommodate organizational size and scope (e.g., global versus regional and local) that I have not covered here. What variations to the hybrid or other models have you used with success? Please do share.

Best, Jim