Powerful Tools for Service Desk Quality and Cost Savings

Powerful and Practical Tools
for Service Desk Quality
Improvements and Cost
Savings

Kirk Holmes
President, Holmes and Associates, Inc.
kirk@holmesinc.net
http://www.holmesinc.net

About ITSM Academy

 Accredited Education  Since 2003 - Tens of
 Certified Process Design Engineer Thousands Trained and
(CPDE) Certified
 ITIL® Foundation  ITSM Professional Diplomas
 ITIL Capability (OSA|PPO|RCV|SOA)  Change/Support/SLM
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 ITIL Managing Across the Lifecycle U.S.
(MALC)
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ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark of the Cabinet Office.

© ITSM Academy  And more! 2 Welcome!
 Certified Woman-Owned

Objectives and Agenda of
this Presentation

Objective: Keep it Real !!
• Explain usage of tools like Lean Six Sigma
• Provide tips, guidance simple, tangible take-away’s
• Give glimpse of other useful tools and frameworks
• Get you moving towards tangible improvement

Agenda
• LSS overview
• Case Study background
• Case study results

© Holmes and Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved

About Kirk Holmes
• 30 year management, technology, & strategy consultant
• Appointed as 2011 Examiner for Malcolm Baldrige National
Quality Award
• First General Manager for Broadband Internet within Comcast
• Founding Advisory Board member for Enterprise SPICE
(part of ISO 15504)
• Education: MIT B.S. Electrical Engineering; Stanford MBA

• Member, itSMF USA Board of Directors Jan 2007 – Dec 2010
• Portfolios included Publications, Bus Dev, Treasurer, Knowledge Management
(responsible for USA launch of ITIL® Version 3)
National Capital • One of original 23 founding members in 2003
Area LIG • LIG President from 2006 – 2009 (grew to largest LIG in world)


About Holmes and
Associates, Inc.
• Executive advisory and operational consulting
• IT Service Management Excellence
• Operational performance improvement
• Business Transformation (culture, Organizational
Change Management, organizational design)
• Service Solutions

• Clients have included IRS, NIH, Army, Time
Warner, Comcast, State of Montana


What is Lean Six Sigma?

Lean Reduce
Waste Reduce Cost
And and Time
Complexity

Improve
Six Sigma Quality
Improve
Mean and
Count Reduce Meet
Variation Customer
Duration Needs

Some Popular Lean Six
Sigma Tools

Pareto Charts
Value Stream Mapping
Cause & Effect Diagrams
Frequency Plots (Histograms)
Scatter Plots
Control Charts (SPC)
Mistake Proofing
Four Step Rapid Setup Reduction
Process Flow Improvement


DMAIC Methodology
Overview

8

CASE STUDY: Large Service
Desk Facing Growth Pains
• Rising demand (calls)

Call Volume
• Challenging abandonment
• Big seasonality
• Rising cost per call

THE BIGGEST CUSTOMER CONCERN:
Resolution of user issues sometimes takes as
long as 180 days or more


Initial Improvement Through
Assessments Helped
EVALUATION TOPIC GAP COMMENT
Pre-Requisites
1 1 Does a Service Desk exist which manages, co-ordinates N
Baldrige National Quality Award
HD only takes calls but does not manage, co-ordinate and resolve HD does not meet Service Desk criteria for being
and resolves incidents reported by customers?
(Organizational Maturity) and benefits not understood.
Incidents. They may pass major incidents onto the COMC but the SPOC and management/coordination of all
Help Desk does not co-ordinate or manage. incidents. Purpose
• Leadership Not much proactive communication to users on
IT Infrastructure Library ® • Customer Satisfaction level changes).
behalf of AKO (e.g., planned changes, service

1 3 Does the Service Desk provide information to customers
regarding planned changes?
N
• People
No information to callers about planned changes

Management Intent • Process
1.5 4 Is the business need for a Service Desk clearly identified
and understood?
N
• Information and Analysis
The need for Help Desk is clearly identified, but some of
management team but because of combined responsibilities
• for serving Army AKO Customer, it is
between Gov't and ContractorPlanning
not clear about combined commitment to ITIL Service Desk

1.5 7 Has the purpose and benefits of the Service Desk been N Purpose and benefits of an ITIL-compliant Service Desk not clear.
disseminated within the organization?
1.5 8 Has an education and/or training program been conducted N While there is general understanding of Help Desk functions, more
for customers and users in the use of the Service Desk and effort needed to educate and pre-empt calls, and to expand the
its benefits benefits
Process Capability
2 11 Does the Service Desk provide the customer/user with N Does not follow-up on calls or relationship between calls. They Does not provide proactive updates on incidents
information on service availability, an incident number or handle each contact on its own (mostly resolved on initial call, e.g.,
reference for use in follow-up communications, and progress password resets)
updates on any request being managed by the service
team?
2 13 Does the Service Desk communicate planned and short- N Does not focus on communicating or even tracking planned Does not play a central role in Change
Benchmarks
• Lower Cost/call
term changes of service levels to customers? changes. They do not always know right away, and they do not Management
always get updates unless they call the COMC so they can't always
communicate. No reference to a single Forward Schedule of
Change

• Lower Average Handle Time
2 14 Does the Service Desk provide a status update to the N No follow up or ownership of Incidents or requests until close.
customer on the closure of incidents? Each call-in is acted on independently
2 15 Does the Service Desk provide management information N Does not analyze data to contribute to service improvement, but No central role in Service Improvement
Help Desk Institute (HDI)
and make recommendations for service improvement? only on ticket and contact data (volume received and handling

2 16 Has a study of the workload mix been conducted to
reference
determine the required staff levels, skill type and the
associated costs of the Service Desk?
metrics).

analyzed for staffing levels)
• Improved Service Levels
N Workload mix not analyzed for costs and efficiency (but now being Workload mix not analyzed for costs and
efficiency. HD

2 17 Are customer satisfaction surveys carried out by the Service
Desk? web upgrade to enable sampling. …but still no prevention of
N Satisfaction surveys have been discussed. Waiting for RightNow No satisfaction surveys

sporadic high-MTTR tickets

Death by KPIs: Not All
Metrics are Actionable
• Management monitoring of streams of
data with no context
• Data ≠ Information (even with ITIL® KPIs)

DAILY INCOMING VOLUME
All Customer Interactions
AVERAGE HANDLE TIME
(Incidents and Service Requests)
HOURLY UTILIZATION
HOURLY ABANDONMENT RATES


Lingering Dissatisfaction
with Escalation

Exceptions are
easily overlooked
by Service Desk
until crises erupt
because daily
metrics look good


ITIL® Guidance?
• Escalate from Tier 2 to Tier 3 when “the
incident will need deeper technical
knowledge or the second-level group has not
been able to resolve the incident within
agreed target times…”
• “Hierarchic escalation is also used … so that
senior managers are aware and can be
prepared and take any necessary action”


Asking and Answering the
Right Questions
• If we are doing ITIL®, does that mean we are
doing well?
• When should OLAs and SLAs be revisited?
• How does this performance really compare with
the past?
• When is executive intervention needed?
• How can we get the tough Tier 3 escalations to
be quickly resolved (competing priorities)?


TIP: Start with Tie-In to
Balanced Scorecard (BSC)

Financial Customer
Business
Workforce
process
Financial Metrics MEET FINANCIAL AND GROWTH TARGETS
Current
Financial YTD
Measures Description How Measured Baseline Targets Nov Dec YTD Period
Goals Analysis
Analysis

Increase Cost per
Total monthly cost divided by <$3.50
Customer Cost Contact, Fees charged per contact $5.98 /contact $4.61 $4.90 $5.35
total number of contacts handled /contact
Efficiencies normalized

Increase Total monthly cost billed (total
Cost per User, $0.40/user $0.30/user/mo
Customer Cost Fees charged per user labor plus direct fees) divided $0.37 $0.36 $0.39
normalized /month nth
Efficiencies by Average number of Users


CASE STUDY: Define
Phase
Problem/Goal Statement Business Impact
Problem: Customers are Statement
experiencing delays in the
resolution of their issues that can
sometimes exceed 180 days from The project will improve the capability to
date of receipt manage all tickets escalated from Tier I
Scope: This project will address tasks to Tier III and back to the user through
within the Service Desk Ticket final resolution by reducing the ticket
process processing times by 95% for all
Goal: The goal of the project is to escalated tickets.
achieve a 90% reduction in the
number of improperly escalated It will also streamline the ticket
Service Desk incidents. An escalation process by ensuring all
additional goal is to ensure that affected parties can properly use the
the users are kept informed of ticketing system in order to expedite
their incident’s resolution progress incident review and resolution.
at least every 7 days, and that
escalated tickets are resolved
within 30 days.
© Holmes and Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved 16

LSS Rule: Listen to
Stakeholders

VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER
VOICE OF THE BUSINESS

KIRK’s RULE of THUMB:
If you never or rarely have formally asked customers
their satisfaction, you are doing poorly in the eyes of the
customer


Case Study Process
Workshop

Process Step: (Tier 2) Check for existing
• Map the Flow of Process Steps Unknown Errors and Problems
• Map the Flow of Information
Trigger: Assigned Ticket
• Add Data Boxes and Starbursts
Done: Record Saved
• Identify Value Added (VA) vs. Non Value
Added (NVA) steps TCT (Total Cycle Time): 5 Min
People: 1
Changeover Time: N/A
% First Time Yield:

Top Issues

Engage the Team 1. Insufficient incident data - Record not complete


Measure Phase – Measure
the Right Thing
Value Stream Map Baseline Data Collected

Do it like a Ritz Carlton CEO


Analyze Phase – Using All
the Big Brains
CVA/NVA/NVA-R Analysis Critical X/Root Cause Analysis

Critical X/Root Causes Analysis Prioritized Root Causes / Effects

Pareto
Chart


Improve Phase – Making it
Happen
Key Improvements “To-Be” Process Map

• Accelerated Sr. Management review
of potentially overdue tickets
(Hierarchical) Reengineering after
• Accelerated Tier 2 Review of unedited
Tier 3 tickets (Functional) doing Deep Dive into
• Modification of ticketing system Escalation steps and handoffs
queues to prevent stagnation
• Streamlined escalation and de-
escalation (reduced waste of NVA
hierarchical steps)
• Dedicated Tier 2 ticket processing
roles
• Re-Training for Tier 1,2,3 personnel
• Operational Level Agreements
between Tiers
• New reporting using Control Charts
• Sampling of escalations used to track
proper/improper handling %
• New KPIs focusing on escalation


Control Phase –
Consolidating the Victory

• Transition to process owner
• SOPs
• Training
• Replication

Step Action/Task Responsible Accountable Consulted Informed
1 Nov 6 Full SOP update of new process flow Bob John Craig Alex
New report format – weekly, Craig,
2 Nov 12 monthly Fred John Sandy Mike


TIP: Learn Control Charts

Time to Resolve (TTR) for all
escalated tickets (sorted by
time-date stamp)

• Mean value (shown as X) – drive
down towards 0
• Upper Control Limit (UCL) – drive down towards goal of 7 days
• Exceptional variations (the red dots that fall outside the control range)
• General trends in the variation, e.g., if everything starts creeping up


Results: Control Charts
PROVE Less Fire Fighting

BEFORE AFTER

Mean Time to Resolve
Variability
Extreme violations


Results: Proven Impacts
on the Business
5 Year Monthly Measure BEFORE AFTER
Projected
Mean Time To 15.1 days 4.6 days
Cost Resolution for
Avoidance ̴ escalated tickets *

$1 Million % escalated tickets 48% 72%
closed in less than 7
days

% of tickets properly 54% 75%
escalated

* Used 2-t Significance Test to prove
statistical significance of case study
improvements


Tip: Use Tool+Methodology

A fool with a tool and a methodology
is less likely still a fool

I Chart of 2009-09-04 Weekly TTR _(Days)
50
1

40
1
1
1
1

Individual Value
30 1
1 1
1 1
1
1
20 11 1
1 1
1 1 1 11 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 11 1
1
1
1 1
1
1
UCL=12.03
10
_
X=5.31

0
LCL=-1.41

1 61 121 181 241 301 361 421 481 541 601
Observation


Key Concepts
• ITIL® alone is not sufficient
• Data vs. information
• Voice of Customer & Voice of Business
• Alignment and harmony To Do List:
 Stop
• Cross-functional teams are critical blaming
• Tools can help if used correctly  Start
• Remember Hawthorne analyzing
• Methodology helps  Control the
things within
• Fact-Based decision-making (see Baldrige) your control
• Feel the Data


Thank you

Contact details:
Kirk Holmes
http://www.holmesinc.net
kirk@holmesinc.net
(301) 998-6108


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