Published:

ServiceTalk - The Journal Of The IT Service Management Forum - June 2003  

Strategies For The Tool Difficult Box (1)

© 2003 Karen Falconer; Karen Ferris; Heather Stebbings.

Every organisation has one. It is filled on a regular basis, and it is usually the underlying reason that “the experts” are called in – like some cure-all panacea, to “solve” the problems we are now all too familiar with: 

·         Changes take too long and cause too much down time

·         The business complain that they don’t get value for money from IT

·         There is no customer focus

·         A finite resource unable to meet the demands put upon them

·         Our Outsource Partner doesn’t deliver what we need

·         Development don’t take into account operational requirements

·         Live Support raise too many barriers and cannot define requirements

·         And there’s more…

In our experience the underlying problems are depressingly familiar across organisations, regardless of size and complexity: 

·         Lack of leadership

·         Fire-fighting is normality

·         Protectionism of pseudo empires resulting in resistance to change

·         The organisation does not provide clear roles and responsibilities

·         No Service Catalogue or Service Level Agreements defined and agreed

·         Poor customer service and lack of understanding of your business

·         Too much evidence of work harder not smarter attitudes towards staff

·         Lack of skills in the right areas and lack of investment in people.

Dealing with any of these issues requires a number of change initiatives, which all too often are sold into the boardroom by client-hungry “IT Partners” as Quick Wins, under the guise of a Re-engineering Revolution, rather than the solid Evolution approach that it needs to be.  External consultancy services come at a premium price, so there is a tendency to over egg the Quick Win element of any transformation and to sell the overall strategy short by keeping everything high level and out of sight of the troops. 

As with all major change programmes, they need to be initiated as a formal project with the production of a scoping document, strategy and more importantly a business case with true business sponsors.  All too often, IT tries to bring in major Service Improvement Programmes using the “side of the desk” policy.  This usually equates to no formal project status, which means that resource has not been allocated to cover the additional workload.  This equates to Strategic work not moving forward as staff continue to battle with their day jobs.

If you are able to bring in external resource to help, make sure that you agree a remit up front.  A fundamental approach, often missed, is that your external resource needs to be managed.  Make sure that they produce an approach document with key deliverable’s, targets and measures.  Also ensure that they produce a plan and provide you with at least weekly progress reports.  Make sure that you have allocated time to review and act on any issues raised. 

The key word to focus on is STRATEGIC - this means taking a long term view to win the war and should not be confused with TACTICAL solutions which are usually just one step ahead from firefighting.  In our experience, where IT departments have two or more of the above problems, they have, generally speaking, no long term strategy to support Service Improvement or indeed to meet the strategic needs of the business.  As with all nightmares you have to break the cycle of events, face up to some hard facts and start planting the seeds of change.  If you fail to nurture these seeds you will never be able to harvest the crop and over time, the soil becomes a barren land where nothing can grow.

The important thing is to recognise that mistakes can be made – when they do, don't encourage bad behaviour by adopting a reactive JFDI approach.  Invariably this will break the fundamental processes and procedures that you have put in place.  JFDI is usually fuelled by serious outages on core business applications, or unrealistic deadlines being placed on project managers. Quality takes time to mature, you must stick to your guns and always ensure that you are re-enforcing new ways of working, this often requires guts and determination and the ability to see the end game.  If you always give in to the short-term benefit the Too Difficult Box will never get tackled.

For the war torn, weary IT manager and staff, the right external resource will bring in fresh ideas, enthusiasm and commitment to make things happen.  However, there has to be visible leadership and support from the top of the organisation to make sure that the right resource is allocated to the tasks that lie ahead.   

So what do we mean by VISIBLE Leadership and Support? 

In its simplest form, it requires Senior Managers and Executives to send out communiques to the troops, announcing that changes are under way and confirm that we are all heading towards the same goals.  This can be re-enforced in a number of ways, but the most visible is to walk the floor.  It’s always a bit awkward at first, especially if you haven’t ventured out of your office for a while, but you will be amazed how much you will learn by sitting next to a Service Desk Operative or by shadowing a PC Support Engineer.  We would also recommend that wherever possible Senior Managers create joint initiatives, which transcend the boundaries of your Organisation Structure.  Encourage staff to come up with initiatives, actively listen to problems and deal with them.

Advice from the front line:  

Bush Fires... every organisation has the occasional fire burning, this is reality.  In a well run ITIL environment, the fire extinguisher is to hand, everyone knows how to deal with the fire and afterwards there is a review to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

In less mature organisations the fires can rage and turn into Bush Fires. Everyone is maxed out fighting fires, JFDI becomes the norm and nothing ever seems to improve. How do firefighters put the bush fires out? They dig a firebreak and leave part of the forest burning whilst they set about protecting the rest of the forest.

IT should consider doing the same.  If the Too Difficult box is loaded with fires, TALK TO THE BUSINESS - negotiate lower SLA’s where you can.  This will enable you to divert valuable resource to work on the tasks identified.  Empower the more experienced people to be freed up to work on pro-active solutions.  This isn’t rocket science - it’s the common sense approach to significantly reducing the Known Errors, which cause the bush fires, and it enables the organisation to move forward in a quality way, day by day.

What about our Customers perception of IT?

More often than not, organisations have no real picture of the Key Services that they provide, let alone all the services. So do we pull this out of the box and attack Service Level Management? Definitely, but with caution! 

IT has to start the Service Level process by understanding its current capability. It is no good just asking the customer what they want and then expecting an invisible injection of Viagra to enable IT to meet those performance requirements! It does not work like that. IT must analyse and document its current performance as a baseline for negotiations with the customer. Current performance and capability will only be known through processes such as Incident Management, Change and Configuration Management, Availability Management, and Capacity Management.

Where do we start? 

Almost everyone goes for implementing a Service Desk first, because that's what the customers see.  However without some form of Configuration Management you cannot perform useful trend analysis and Change Management remains a hit and miss affair.  Answer: ensure that you bring in a high level form of Configuration Management and concentrate on Impact Assessment.   

A good way of achieving this is to partner with Key Business users and walk thru’ the company’s product life cycle.  By working with the Business, you will be able to produce a chart mapped to the business processes.  This will enable IT to "see" how the systems actually support the business.  From there you can utilise the Application Support Groups and Development Teams to map out the applications, interfaces, batch jobs, dependencies et al and the Infrastructure team to map out the Hardware and connectivity.  It’s a fairly simple exercise to create impact assessment charts vital for Change Management.  These will provide useful information for the other IT staff, including Development.  This exercise will also build bridges between IT and the Business and Support and Development Teams.  The Too Difficult Box is by nature a hard nut to crack, key to the success of these strategies, is cross-functional teamwork and open honest communication.

How do I free up resource – we’re always fire fighting?

Knowledge Management is the key, investment in a fully integrated Service Management tool pays back dividends in the end.  However, if you don’t have the budget for one, don’t let that hold you back, it’s amazing what you can achieve with MS Access or Lotus Notes.  Every Manager has to ensure that every help desk record is completed with steps to restore service.  Allocate someone to the task of Incident Management and invest in a proactive Problem Management Team who can extract Known Errors and ensure that workarounds are documented and available.  One key relationship often missed is that between Testers and Problem Managers.  Both have a vested interest in recording Known Errors and workarounds, make sure that you have open communication running between the two areas.

In recognising that companies don’t always have the in-house skills to bring about the revolution required, the Exec Team often resort to “bring in the experts” in the belief that these “change agents” with their interventionist activities will transfer their strategic capability to your environment. The problem with this approach is the assumption that you have a willing and able work force with which to carry out this transfer.

Our next article looks at the challenges facing IT today with regard to people management.

Karen Falconer can be contacted via :      karen.falconer@vitilsolutions.com

Karen Ferris can be contacted via :          karen@kmfadvance.com

Heather Stebbings can be contacted via :  heather.stebbings@icore-ltd.com