Once upon a time I carried out a project for an organisation (who were quite possible the best company I worked for during my entire career). Our manager called me with a SLA report and there were breaches taking place - my task was to investigate and see how we could address such a challenge...
Looking at the support tool incident records (or "trouble tickets" as quite often called within the telecom sector); I found minimal information was being logged; quite often "Done". Yet multiple bounces were taking place and SLA breaches were happening that were impacting vital business services - something was going on.
I tasked to meet the people involved. Some of the engineers would provide an elaborate 15 minute explanation of what they did. These were extremely beneficial discussions taking place. We had management support behind us which was a key success factor.
We identified gaps in how we managed support requests. In the background an initiative was being run to enhance automation of our ITIL based incident management process. Our service desk manager provided templates and scripts to level one - so we could make that inital stage of the process more uniform and complete.
We gathered every single support group into multiple sessions and walked through the new process and its corresponding tool action steps. We encouraged and inbibed a culture of good documentation so that other people could benefit from the information being logged.
We looked into how incidents were triaged and assigned - especially in more complex situations. All lessons learnt were used to develop a more mature process that was communicated by training to our people on the ground.
Although a lot of effort was invested; it payed off. Our reporting improved in terms of the quality and value it delivered. Staff and contractors were more motivated as we'd involved them in the change process itself. Management were pleased to see more on-target delivery as well as a higher quality of reporting and delivery.
ITIL is extremely beneficial - but it isn't until we take a holistic view of what impacts our business services and use this to drive improvement efforts that we reap what is expected and as to what will benefit our customers and users.
Comments always most welcome via email to mail@musab.co.uk.
