Large national bank establishes service level and operational level agreements that enable delivery of IT services in alignment with the needs of the business.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
This organization was faced with “owning” services it did not completely control. Incident volumes were growing and too much time was spent finger-pointing and trying to establish ownership and boundaries.

For this team it was imperative they get out of fire-fighting mode, stabilize operations, and mature itself into a proactive organization more focused on building than fixing. In order to do this, and considering that they had never deliberately addressed operational excellence, Covestic decided to focus on seven core areas following a comprehensive IT Service Management (ITSM) assessment: Change Management, Release Management, Configuration Management, Service Monitoring & Control, Incident Management, Problem Management, and Service Level Management.

Like many organizations, they were challenged by the fact that the enterprise was also embracing some facets of ITIL, but at a much slower pace and narrower scale. This meant that the improvements this program was aiming at were constantly moving targets as there was the on-going requirement to adapt to and complement enterprise processes.

This job would require diplomacy and open communication to effectively engage peer organizations, and an effective “meet in the middle” approach with the enterprise to be successful. How do you accomplish radical change while keeping in-step with ever-changing enterprise requirements? You “lead from the side” by demonstrating wins and making it easy for underpinning and partner organizations to support you.

COVESTIC'S SOLUTION
Considering the level of maturity at the start of this engagement, a “process foundation” would need to be established first. Guiding principles, critical success factors, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and basic process blueprints and interfaces would need to be established. Client Process Owners would need to be identified and trained. Following this foundation phase, individual projects, each with well-defined “quick wins”, would be established under a program umbrella with a well defined Program Charter. With Process Foundations established, well defined projects with internal Process Owners, and a well governed Program overseeing the projects, it was just a matter of executing to plan.

Covestic established a service management dashboard fueled by the key performance indicators identified during Process Foundation phase. The dashboard addressed customer experience itself, as well as process effectiveness, by major process area (e.g. Incident, Problem, Change Management, etc.). This dashboard was published monthly during the 14 month duration of the program (and beyond). This allowed for adjustment and steering as we progressed through the program lifecycle, versus after project completion.

RESULTS
The result of the quick win improvements alone while the Program was still underway was remarkable. For the first time, Problems were being tracked and managed independently of Incidents, providing focus on permanently removing Problems and proactively heading off Incidents before they impacted the business. This alone changed the dynamic of the culture, almost overnight, from mostly reactive to proactive. The dashboard showed significant improvements in key areas such as reductions in repeat incidents, reductions in mean time to recover from severity 1 Incidents, and reductions in incidents resulting from change. With Service Level and Operational Level Agreements in place, there was finally a capability for delivery of service in alignment with the needs of the business.