Presentation for #TFT12: ITSM Goodness: Never mind all the theory and industry debate about ITIL and Cloud and Mobile and BYOD and all that. This session from Barclay Rae (ITSMTV's pundit, the Service Desk Inspector and ITSM consultant) is packed with lots of simple tips, ideas and reflections on how to be practically successful with ITSM. Pies might also be mentioned. See Barclay's TFT speaker Pinterest board: http://pinterest.com/servicedesk/barclay-rae/

2. TFT December 2012
ITSM
Goodness

3. Service Desk, SLM and ITSM
Goodness
3

6. Agenda
Life, ITSM and everything…
Building a Brilliant Service
Service Desk Goodness
SLM Goodness
ITSM Goodness
Questions

7. Life, ITSM
and everything

8. What are practitioners saying?
• We need practical help
• We need to be doing stuff that's relevant for the business
• Where do we start?
• How do we react to the new challenges and 'messages' from the
industry?

9. Current dilemmas in ITSM
• Are we/will we be relevant? (ref cloud, BYOD, mobile, social,
gamification) Is ITIL relavant?
• What is the future for Service desk? Is it broken and does it need
re-defining?
• Should SLAs be banned? What's the point of a service catalogue?
What is a service catalogue?

10. We don’t need…ITIL

11. We don’t need…
ITIL, but we need to be:
 Consistent
 Reliable
 Efficient
 Profitable / Productive
 Delivering in line with
expectations

12. We don’t need a Service Catalog

13. We don’t need…
A service catalog, but we need to
 Be able to articulate and present our
services.
 Be accessible and easy to do business
with
 Have relevant information to hand to
deliver efficient support
 Have a basis to identify if we are
meeting business expectations

14. We don’t Need…SLAs

15. We don’t need…
SLAs, but
 We need to have a way of
measuring whether we are
delivering the right levels of
service
 Customers and users want to be
given some expectations around
support and service delivery

16. We do need…a Service Desk

17. We do need…
A service desk, unless of course:
 We can eradicate all issues and problems
associated with IT
 We are happy that customer communication is
handled in an 'ad hoc' manner

18. Moving on…?

19. Moving on…?
Listen and talk to our customers and businesses…
Use the information to build a service model that:
• Focusses IT on meeting organisational / business goals
• Gives clear targets to work towards
• Provides a basis to present our services
• Provides a basis for reporting and value demonstration
Ask ourselves
What business are we in?
Who are our customers?
What do they need from us?

20. Building a
Brilliant Service

21. A brilliant service organisation:
 Has a great reputation with it's peers and customers
 Is respected and appreciated for the value it delivers
 Has tangibly motivated and positive people working in it
 Has a strong identity - a clear and well communicated definition
of its roles, services and ways of working
 Has an open and positive culture of self awareness, development
and improvement
 Is well marketed and publicised to
its customers

22. How is this achieved?
 By hiring for personality not cv or tech skills first - and by being
choosy (those people represent the organisation)
 As a result of Teamwork across the it organisation, as the e.g.
service desk can't do it all on its own
 By technical staff showing respect and appreciation for the
Service ‘Supply Chain’ and the work done by the service desk
 By establishing a clear set of supporting
processes, with owners and governance

23. How is this achieved?
 By establishing clear operational practises and expected levels of
quality and performance, which are constantly measured and
reviewed
 By trusting staff to get on with delivering service, with
empowerment and appropriate autonomy
 By implementing incident tracking, being strict but fair to police
progress and quality of updates across teams
 By building and developing skills profiles that include
communications and business skills as well as technical ones

24. ‘Service Desk
Goodness’

25. A brilliant service desk:
 Is the focal point for the delivery of IT services - and is supported
by other back office and support groups
 Is regarded and actively supported by management as a valuable
asset, not just a cost centre
 Has high levels of first line and first contact resolution (70%+),
low levels of attrition (>5%) and minimal telephony abandon rate
(>5%)
 Has very high levels of customer advocacy and satisfaction ratings
 Is seen as an aspirational place
to work

26. Building a brilliant Service Desk
 Hire brilliant (people)-people
 Set the tone
 Clearly define the 1st/2nd/3rd level model
 If the Service Desk is important, invest in it
 Make it an aspirational place to work
 Generally first time fix is faster cheaper and better for
customers

27. Service Desk – World Class (sample)
Customer Advocacy
• Customers are happy to recommend the service received
• They are enthusiastic about providing references or testimonials
Efficiency
• Efficiency and performance are constantly reviewed with actions
• Metrics are publicised and promoted across IT and customers alike
• The organisation continually looks at optimising cost with BAU
Emotional Intelligence
• All are empowered to act beyond their normal remit
• Proactive behaviour is encouraged and regularly demonstrated
• Issues are seen as opportunities for improvement
• Issues are tackled with teamwork, customer focus and professionalism

28. Using the right people

29. Using the right people
 Think about the real requirements and outcomes from a role
– do they fit the jacket?
 Service needs people who show commitment, EiQ, empathy,
maturity, professionalism, doggedness, openness,
confidence, consistency
 If you hire based on people’s qualities then you don’t need
so many rules and processes
 If someone doesn’t fit or deliver, customers and service will
be affected

30. Producing appropriate documentation
 Since when did technical writers write by-lines for
newspapers?
 No-one reads more than a page or a few lines
 Don’t write communiques
like project documentation

31. ‘SLM Goodness’

32. Making SLAs work for you
 Start with Services…!
 Move from systems to service focus
 Simple language – not technical or legal jargon
 Realistic and sustainable
 Must be measurable
 ‘SLD’ ?

33. ‘SLM Goodness’
 Don't write an SLA like you are a frustrated lawyer, a novelist,
or a tech junkie...
 SLAs need to show up gaps in capability and performance.
Otherwise how can you improve?
 Don't fudge SLA targets into % of % of %. Keep goals real, not
just easy targets.
 SLAs should be about positive value delivered by IT services,
not just how IT responds to failure.

34. Too much information

35. IT Services – VFM?

36. System, not service, reporting

37. ‘SLM Goodness’
 Good news! Your service reporting is a bundle of stuff you
already report on, like availability, customer satisfaction,
and support performance
 IT SLM documentation should be written in human English,
otherwise it's self-serving, patronising tech BS...
 Don't be side-tracked from setting aspirational SLA targets
because of 1 or 2 occasions where it will fail - that's the
point!

39. ‘SLM Goodness’
 SLM projects are not for the faint or tech-hearted...
 Don't expect too much if you ask a junior person to set up
SLAs
 Turns out you can't actually set up SLAs without defining
Services first. No really...
 "We tried doing SLAs before - no one was interested"
(Surprised?)

40. ‘ITSM Goodness’

41. It’s not just the Service Desk
 Get other IT teams involved
 Teamwork across IT – avoid ‘Us and them’
 Use business outcomes as the mandate
 Tools and processes can unite (and divide)
 Service development and transition
 Release and service readiness
 SLA and OLA – supply chain

42. Selling your project and getting budget
Clear measureable goals
Business language - not IT/ITSM
How will success be achieved and accepted?
Beware too much cost/financial ambition
You can’t ‘do ITIL’ in 20 days

43. Building a realistic plan
 Short term wins
 What can we do in 30/60 days
 Phasing & focus - reality and outcomes
 Get project management - focus on logistics and people
 Training alone won’t deliver organisational change

44. Getting business people interested
 Don't just talk to them - listen to them
 Ask them in their own terms - make them feel they are
being asked
 Beg, coerce, bribe, start with friendly customers
 Involve them - not a lot of their time needed
 What are the benefits for them and the business as a
whole
 ‘We tried this before’

45. Making Problem Management work
 More about ownership + people than just a process
 Problem Management – part analyst, investigator,
mostly project manager
 Spyglass and whip
 Visibility helps – teams/crowds solve more problems
 What are your top 5 problems?
 Not necessarily just the (successful)
ex Service Desk Manager

46. Cutting through the culture
 Management reporting lines need to be ignored or
subverted
 ITSM is not a traditional IT development project
 People need to feel they are in an environment where
they can (and should) change
 ‘If you can’t change the people, change the people’ -
true but you need to create a clear and positive culture

47. Governance
 Great processes and tools are useless without –
ownership, controls and good management – good
governance…

48. Practicalities
What can we achieve in 10 – 20 – 30 days?
• Get customer feedback and implement quick wins
• Identify cost per service
• Agree cost per service unit – e.g. incident
• Build business metrics model
• Reduce cost of service request handling
• Reduce % incidents + problems
• Increase first time fix by %
• Reduce errors caused by failed changes
• Define the service (process) supply chain
• Clearly define service owners
• Design key services
• Build a service transition process
• Enforce a single Change Process
• Use simple Customer feedback and NPV

49. Thank you for listening…
For more information:
bjr@barclayrae.com
@barclayrae
#ITSMgoodness
www.barclayrae.com
www.itsmtv.co.uk
www.itsmIndex.com
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