Don't settle for a service list when you wanted a service catalogue

Recently I've been approached a few times by organizations looking to put together a service catalogue.  My first question to all of them is "Why?".

Their answer is very important as it will determine if I will take the engagement or turn it down.  My rule of thumb is that if the person asking for the service catalogue cannot tell me right away the advantages of an actionable service catalogue then the engagement will be an educational consulting engagement.  If the person says "Because my boss told me we need one!" then I will probably walk away.

These engagements will typically fail or will offer little to no value to the customer and if I cannot add value to a client, I won't accept the engagement.  Not knowing what they could do with a service catalogue is a sign that they have unrealistic expectations and even the statement of work will probably be a waste of time for me to produce.

A fully functional service catalogue is a powerful tool for IT service management and can significantly improve your organizations service delivery, help you with the service strategy and service design and can be fully integrated into your continuous improvement initiative.  Not only can it make your IT team more effective, it can also act as a communication medium with your customers helping them understand what IT does and what expectations they should have with your levels of service.

All too often I'm contacted to fix an existing service catalogue.  Someone who doesn't understand the usefulness of a service catalogue has gone down a long and expensive road to produce a 'list' of existing services.  Although this can quantify the services provided it provides very little value.  More often then not, the list is from the viewpoint of IT not the consumer of the service and will become out of date almost as soon as it's published.  If you are producing a service catalogue from the point of view of implemented components then you have produced data that should probably reside in your CMDB.

So what should you keep in mind when producing (or engaging to produce) a service catalogue?

• All services should be from the viewpoint of the consumer.  When I go through the drive through at a coffee shop I order the coffee, pay for it, receive it and walk away.  I don't care about how many coffee machines they have, how much water they consume, if they have enough sugar, etc.
• Determine what information is useful in a service catalogue.  What the service is, what the expected service levels should be, cost, how to initiate the service, etc.
• Determine how the catalogue will be produced for new services or kept up to date for existing services.  It needs to be an integrated deliverable through PMO and change management processes.
• Determine the KPIs for each service.  Use the consumers experience of the service as a guide.  Was my coffee delivered in a timely manner?  Was my order correct?  Did I get the correct change?  Also base the KPIs on your your service strategy.  If the strategy to be fast, accurate, friendly, high quality or a combination of those things make sure your KPIs reflect the strategy.  If your strategy does not reflect the wants of the consumers then you may need to revisit the strategy.
• Ensure roles and responsibilities for management of the service catalogue are well documented and understood.
• Ensure the integration points for other IT service management practices are in place. Incident management, change management, capacity management, financial management, etc.  This is where you will get the full value of a catalogue.
• Develop the content for the catalogue and publish it.  Use automated tools if costs are not prohibitive and allow self service wherever possible.
• Once the catalogue is in place, measure it's effectiveness and continuously improve.

Hopefully these tips will help establish a useful service catalogue instead of another document that will sit on a shelf and be forgotten.

For more information on producing an actionable service catalogue, contact tony@tonydenford.com.

IT Service Management in the Cloud

When most CIOs start to think about their cloud strategy, the thought of "losing control" of their IT environment is usually the first big concern.  Most are not comfortable with handing over control of the services they deliver, primarily because they don't have a clear understanding of what services they deliver and therefore cannot look for the right opportunities to use the cloud as an advantage.

This makes a good IT Service Management strategy ever more important.  Instead of the older ITIL V2 methods which manage specific assets, you need to be focused more than ever on IT Service delivery whether that service is managed in-house or some mysterious location in the cloud.

Before moving your infrastructure to the cloud and realizing the potential savings of doing so you really need to have your IT service management in place and running smoothly.

A mature ITSM practice will have a good understanding of what services are being provided, exactly how they perform, how much it costs to deliver the service and, most importantly, exactly what is required to deliver the service with the quality expected by your customers.

Knowing how much the services cost and what is required for them to be considered of value to the business puts organizations in an excellent position to move parts of their platform to the cloud.  Vendors you deal with for any cloud solution can then be held accountable for ensuring the service delivery by your own internal IT Service Management team.

Your ITSM team should know how to measure the delivery, how to ensure costs are in line with expectations and that the vendors are capable of delivering consistently or held accountable when they don't.

So the operational role of IT is changing from managing all the nuts and bolts required to support your business to managing the vendors and support processes required to ensure consistent service excellence.

For more information on how Tony Denford can help your organisation manage it's IT Service Management practice, contact tony@tonydenford.com.

Is your IT Support structure "Upside Down"?

I've consulted at enough clients to know a pattern exists out there where the support structure in place is what I call Upside Down.  What I'm referring to is that the wrong people are placed in the wrong roles.    You have your highest value workers doing the lowest value work.

Here are some of the symptoms of an upside down support structure:

• Service desk analysts resolve too few calls.  They typically log the tickets and pass them on to a second line support team.
• Your SMEs are spending all their time resolving incidents and have done this role for some time.
• Your customers are frustrated about the length of time it takes to resolve issues and that each time they request a major enhancement or project they get dumped with an IT team who doesn't seem to know what they're doing.
• Your entire support staff are stressed up to their eyeballs.

It's not that your IT staff are incompetent but it sure looks that way to the people you are servicing.

What IT as an industry needs to do is take a look at the healthcare industry.  If I have a cold, for example, I can go to any pharmacy and buy something to relieve my symptoms.  I don't need to go and wait in a doctors office if I know how to fix the issue myself.  This is similar to self-serve within IT.  If the user knows what's wrong and what to request to fix it, let them do it themselves.

If my symptoms are uncommon to me, I'd go to my GP.  This doctor knows how to fix all of the most common issues.  How?  They have the training and knowledge available to deal with a vast majority of issues that the general population has to deal with.  And when they don't, they know who to refer the patients to.  They also know how to recognise critical cases and refer them to the local ER.

The ER is another important role within healthcare.  The first person you see in the ER is a triage nurse who quickly assesses the impact of your symptoms and then deals with the most critical cases first.  The triage nurse doesn't usually treat the patient but refers them to the specialists.

The specialists are the last line of defense in healthcare and usually manage the patients until their specialty is no longer needed.  They resolve those issues which need critical attention as well as work longer term to ensure the issues are fully resolved or can be managed reasonably.  They are also often consulted by the earlier lines of defense in the healthcare team

That's a nice overview of healthcare but how does it relate to IT Support?

Lesson 1 - Give self-service wherever it makes sense.  If your service desk is spending a large percentage of it's time resetting passwords for users, make it self-serve.  Understand how much it's costing you in both in financial terms and in terms of reputation and if it makes sense to implement a password reset function then do it.  Look at all your most common services and do a cost benefit analysis on whether it can be automated.

Lesson 2 - Make sure your generalists have the knowledge to deal with the most common issues.  This means passing knowledge to the service desk as it becomes available and making sure they understand what is going on in the organization and what changes are happening.

Lesson 3 - If you're not sure how bad the issue is, have effective triage methods in place to deal with the most critical issues first.  Have pre-determined protocols in place to quickly establish the severity and priority of any issue.  Don't let this happen on-the-fly because we all know that the squeaky wheel is the one that gets the oil.

Lesson 4 - Let your subject matter experts focus on truly fixing the root cause of the issue.  Each time a root cause is fixed properly, it will never recur saving everyone time and effort.  If the subject matter experts are spending all their time patching issues and moving onto the next one, the cost will never go away and you may not know when it's going to come up again.  If your SMEs are not fighting fires, they will have time to work on fire prevention techniques or developing a new way to limit the impact of future fires.

Lesson 5 - Give your less skilled second and third level support staff a chance to learn.  Most teams are set up so the SME is the first to see every issue and then passes the easier tasks down to more junior team members.  By doing the opposite (less skilled members see the issues first and then refer to more skilled members if needed) you will give the lower skilled team members a chance to learn hands on and the SME has a chance to see what knowledge other team members are missing and find more effective ways to share that knowledge.  This does mean that the SME also needs to play an oversight role and will look over the shoulder of others to ensure no mistakes are made.

If you put these methods into place your service delivery will improve significantly.  Incidents will be resolved more quickly.  Service requests will be handled more efficiently.  Problems will get resolved so the incidents don't recur.  You will be able to have your SMEs consult on projects and major enhancements and ensure new solutions build on what you have in place rather than produce more overhead and integration issues.

For more information on how to best manage your IT Service Delivery team email me at tony@tonydenford.com.

Is your service design proactive?

Here's what happens all too often with IT organizations;

• Idea for a new product
• Project is initiated
• Designed
• Built
• Tested
• Implemented
• End of project celebration
• Realization that new product needs support!

The result of this are IT services that are reactive to the operational need.  Usually IT starts with the "fix it if it breaks" approach and then as this becomes a pain point for their business partners they move on to some form of problem management and slowly mature the processes in response to the business frustration.

More mature organizations will realize that support will be needed before the implementation but usually there is little focus on what services need to be in place or how they should be delivered.

Listing the support you provide to each application may be a start but it's not the best approach to service design.  Good service design takes a step back.  Define what services you will provide, how and when you will provide them, understand the costs to provide them and understand the expectations of the consumers.

If you want truly world class service delivery you will need to think even bigger about your service design.  Does the way you perform the service not only keep the consumers happy but does it also give you ways to add more value?

Do you think it's just coincidence that the line in Starbucks passes the baked goods, mugs and holiday specials?  Of course not.  There are quicker ways of delivering the coffee to the customers but they cost more, are not expected by the consumers and would lose the coffee giant an opportunity to up-sell.  So service design is not just about making the delivery faster.  It's about making it better for everyone involved.

All of these things considered, you do have to do a balancing act.  The service must be efficient and add value but if it's badly designed and I now have to listen to 15 minutes of advertising to get my coffee, I'll be shopping somewhere else.

For more information on IT Service Design email tony@tonydenford.com.