Gratification
Technology is worthwhile because it shortens the distance between what we want and what we have. Push a button, and hey presto, a car picks you up, wherever you are. Be on your way home and the house warms up before your arrival.
A lot of service improvement can be achieved by shortening the delay until a customer is gratified, whether by the resolution of his problem or by the fulfillment of a request. This is not limited to Silicon Valley based outfits like Uber and Nest as in the examples above. Any IT department can apply the same principles. Delay is always a huge dissatisfier and can almost always be shortened.
One way is by doing a Lean-based project and optimizing your processes to be more concise and deliver the desired outcomes with fewer steps. The process efficiency can nearly always improve in the double digits.
Another way is to rethink what the scope of IT management and support should be in your organization. Companies with a younger employee and customer demographic can get away with a lot less IT support and empower the end users to find and implement their own solutions. This minimalist approach doesn’t service everyone though.
Anticipation is key for larger and more complex IT departments. Checking in with each department and team on a monthly basis is key, reviewing what is coming at them, and the impact on IT systems and services. Internally within the IT department a biweekly tempo of planning and execution offers enough flexibility to deal with incidents and sick days while offering predictability back to the business. This works very well for everything related to projects and change management.
The final and hardest to implement is slack. Efficient resource planning leads to zero wasted hours in a best case, low variability scenario. In every real-world case it leads to over-commitment and strained resources, missed deadlines and dissatisfaction all around. Slack is crucial to a capable, responsive IT department. Depending on variability, there should be about 20% overcapacity on incident management to ensure that service levels are being met regardless of sudden spikes in call volume. Empowered employees don’t have to waste this time. Documentation, ticket system maintenance and learning are great tasks to backfill this extra capacity in such a way it remains available. Another way to constrain the costs of reserve capacity is to have it on-call with a third party, lowering fixed costs but raising incidental costs when this capacity is actually called into use.
So far I’ve never seen an IT department that did not over commit and have too much work-in-progress to ensure quality and responsiveness. Service providers during the onboarding phase are especially prone to over-extension, needing their best people to get a handle on the newest customer at the cost of supporting existing ones. The introduction of eXperience Level Agreements (XLA) instead of Service Level ones can help to maintain the focus on customer satisfaction. After all IT is not in the business of selling time, but gratification of needs.
