Global financial institution leverages Covestic's ITIL expertise to realize measurable operational improvement.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
A Fortune 500 institution with customers in over 150 countries was faced with multiple challenges in their IT service management processes, due to lack of structure and miscommunications. With well over 150,000 employees at more than 5,000 sites distributed across over 30 countries, they needed to establish comprehensive operational management practices in order to deliver the services necessary to meet corporate objectives.

Individual information technology groups had been set up to operate with a large degree of autonomy, making the delivery of consistent services to the end-customers difficult to manage. As a result, incident volumes in some groups were high, as were volumes of repeat incidents and higher than expected repair times.

The IT groups were faced with responsibly for services that they did not completely control. Incident volumes were growing and too much time was being spent finger-pointing and trying to establish ownership and boundaries. For this IT group, it was imperative that they stabilize operations and move from a reactive service model to a more proactive organization focused on building, rather than fixing.

The company knew it needed to bring in a partner who understood that a real plan with a clear method for measuring and reporting on improvements was essential to meeting their IT operational challenges.

COVESTIC'S SOLUTION
Covestic was able to prove to the financial institution that they were the right partner to address these challenges by demonstrating a proven, methodical approach to assessing and successfully implementing ITIL-based solutions. Upon completion of the detailed assessment phase of the project, Covestic determined that there were seven core areas that needed focus: change management, release management, configuration management, service monitoring and control, incident management, problem management, and service level management.

Covestic then delivered a plan to address each area of concern as part of a guided process designed to ease the internal transitions and cultural adoption that would be necessary to ensure the project's ongoing success.

Covestic first developed a process foundation and established guiding principles, critical success factors, key performance indicators, and basic process blueprints and interfaces. The internal process owners were then clearly identified and received training on the new structure. Following this initial phase, individual projects with multiple, well-defined steps were established to ensure incremental rollout and create quick-wins for the client.

Covestic then established a service management dashboard fueled by the key performance indicators identified during the process foundation. The dashboard addressed customer experience itself, as well as process effectiveness by major process areas such as incident, problem, or change. This allowed for adjustment as the projects progressed through the program life cycle, rather than fine-tuning after the project was over.

RESULTS
Remarkable results were realized with the improvements - even while the project was still underway. For the first time, problems were being tracked and managed independent of incidents, providing focus on permanently removing problems and proactively heading off incidents before they affected the business. This changed the dynamic of the IT organization considerably, from mostly reactive to almost entirely proactive.

The dashboard showed significant improvements in key areas such as reductions in repeat incidents, reductions in meantime to recover from severity level-one incidents, and reductions in incidents resulting from change. With service level and operational level agreements in place, there was finally capability for delivery of services in alignment with the company's business objectives.