From Tony Gannon
In this update … progress on Service Management Tooling and some of the resolution processes (Incident, Problem and Request Fulfilment).
The “resolution” processes are focused on improving our ability to consistently respond to service issues in a timely way and restoring service effectively with minimal disruption to the customer. They also consider proactive prevention of re-occurrence of these issues where practical. Lastly, they facilitate efficient fulfilment of routine, service requests in line with agreed resolution time-frames.
Incident Management – We now have much improved, day-to-day management and direction for this process. The increased focus is clearly having a positive impact on our ability to respond and manage service issues. Breached incidents are significantly down from this time last year and regularly down to single figures. Periods of achieving zero breached incidents have also been seen.
In support of the process there has been a focused effort on making the Daily Services Review (DSR) a more effective meeting which had positive feedback from a recent external audit. The DSR is about making all operational staff aware of current issues, providing direction and support to current workloads and ensuring a more effective response.
Future improvements will consider more consistent adoption of common practices and disciplines as documented in our Call Handling Policy.
Request Fulfilment – Response times have improved, and a more balanced distribution of workload and types of work undertaken is also being seen. This process has been supported by considerable effort from the campus team leaders who have achieved an improved allocation of requests across the teams. This has been supported by the introduction of a work allocation policy (within 4 hours).
The efforts in this area had initially and largely been focused across campus support where analysis has helped team leaders and queue managers to recognise strengths and weaknesses in the way we fulfil requests.
Future improvements here will see a broadening of the focus of work allocation across wider areas of DTS. Some changes to the way we manage queues is anticipated to support this. We should also see a review and broadening of what we measure to validate the initial resolution targets that are being set.
Problem Management – Significant improvements are being achieved by the Problem process and the list of problems that is being formally accepted and actioned is increasing.
Several DTS subject matter experts under the direction of the Problem Manager have supported the improvements by taking on problem coordination tasks which include
- analysis to clarify the issue (documenting a brief Problem Statement)
- highlighting and detailing the extent of effort needed to undertake a more detailed root cause analysis (RCA Plan) and once completed:
- detailing the effort and activities needed to effect a permanent solution (Plan to Fix)
The outputs from this activity will significantly improve our customer experience, proactively preventing known issues from impacting our customers and by ultimately reducing the reactive and repetitive support tasks by freeing up time for our stretched support teams.
Future improvements will be around achieving more effective planning and establishing improved tracking of benefits achieved.
Tooling – The tooling implementation stream of the SIP which spans the integration of an industry leading service management toolset (Assyst) and underpinning asset management tool (SNOW) has begun in earnest with the SIP leads and other key stakeholders providing input through some of the early workshops to explore options for the initial configuration of the tools.
The plan is currently ahead of schedule with some very positive comments coming from the vendor in respect of our readiness to progress. This gain in time will no doubt prove useful later in the project should any unforeseen issues occur.
Administration teams and Process Managers have completed some early configuration and admin training just recently with further training planned. Wider training for operational staff will occur following an initial ‘train the trainer’ event, followed by DTS – wide user training and supporting communications which is targeted for July.
Next Update:
In our next update we will feature updates from the relationship and agreement processes i.e.
- Supplier Management.
- Business Relationship Management (BRM).
- Service Level Management (SLM) including some information about a support charter (an internally focused service agreement and a very early precursor to more formal SLAs).
- An update on the status of the IT Service Catalogue.
We also expect to be able to provide an update on progress across Request Fulfilment, the Self-Service Portal being implemented in Assyst and possibly some early news on Change, Configuration and Release Management plans ahead of the summer break.
A drop-in session is scheduled for Wednesday 18th July at 2pm so why not pop along to get an update and share your views.
