Economic slowdown or business opportunity?
In times like now, when businesses may go down the road of strategic reorganization, making the best of the situation is quite welcome.
Call it a maintenance window instead of a freeze period. Another solid reason to do so in the current climate is the efficiency with which optimizations can be brought to life during a period of fewer operations.
A good idea then to think about the “underdog” of IT Service Management – Continual Improvement. Its guiding principles help to align the outcomes of service delivery to the business expectations and, as importantly, tracks down areas for improvement. Increasing the quality of services and the stakeholder’s satisfaction while keeping or even better – reducing cost, is an area that deserves to be explored even more in strategic periods like now. The iterative agile approach to improvement initiatives simplifies tracking, adds visibility and life cycle to the equation, and can give us a common ground to start from, even if we don’t have a dedicated process.
Where can we start from?
Below are some options, to name a few:
- Heading to the charts of the Reporting department is usually the first place we look. There is no better way to spotting reoccurring patterns which automation can simplify and reduce the unnecessary human time spent.
- Many organizations have a “Lessons learnt” type of knowledge gathered. Revisiting such repositories may help expanding on mechanisms in place for success stories as well us identifying new logic that can be implemented (both in processes and tools) to avoid mistakes.
- Internal audits might tell a different story – one of gaps and risks that could impact us in the future. Being proactive is always good in the long run. A great thing about auditing is also the scope – it allows us to focus on the big picture. We might be repeating mistakes because they are in the design of our internal collateral – processes, procedures, work instructions. Take auditing even to Reporting – have we come across areas with poor results and overall satisfaction while the report is “green”?
- Enable communication. Pain points will present themselves also through people – no automation mechanism can have the same observational skill as people in their day-to-day work. Having a common platform that welcomes ideas for improvement and allows such to be easily shared and tracked can vastly help.
In Do It Wise, we have teams spanning across business processes consultancy, solution architects with strong focus on innovation (see for more about innovation here) as well as many other professionals with passion for bringing value.
Our deep expertise gathered by many successful digital transformations has shown us the importance of improvement and innovation. We’ve also seen some bad examples, so we can steer away from such as early as possible.
We at DoITWise recently completed an optimization project for a large European medical materials manufacturer. To illustrate the results, below is their success story.
“We have been maintaining an instance originally setup with the Jakarta release of ServiceNow platform (2016). During the years we’ve upgraded to Kingston but our processes have mostly remained the same.
This situation posed us with a challenge with the upcoming upgrade and it was a good chance to review both the platform deployment and processes implementation. Using help from DoITWise, we’ve performed a series of product and process workshops lead by a DoITWise team. After performing a gap analysis, reviewing out-of-the box offering by ServiceNow we’ve optimized our product and delivery in the following areas:
- Our Service portal gained a new design and functional uplift.
We introduced searching features to support modern user experience. Custom widgets where added to provide our internal customers with an easy and friendly user interface. - Our Service Catalog and underlining fulfillment processes were reviewed and enhanced. We’ve introduced a new Service-centric architecture and support approach. Our Catalog offering was reduced by 38% (catalog items and offerings through a consolidation process).
- The Incident management facilitating form, the fulfillment lifecycle and the UI controls were simplified. We’ve followed ITIL best practices and provided our fulfillers with an intuitive, Service-centric Incident Management process.
The Request Management process was redesigned from ground up, we’ve aligned to the ServiceNow baseline offering and introduced a flexible model to support current and future expansion of our service. We followed the same Service centric approach and designed a lean and efficient Service Request fulfillment and delivery process. - We’ve greatly reduced the complexity and risks of future upgrades by removing outdated processes and platform dependencies keeping the product close to out-of-the-box baseline.
We’re really happy about the time invested to review our processes and have made the ServiceNow platform work better for us. And the best thing is – our internal customers love it :)”
It is beneficial to consider the possibilities the current situation presents us with. Taking strategic decisions in a period with more uncertainties may very well cause less disruptions of services and that comes hand in hand with reduced cost of introducing changes. If you see “now” as a maintenance window rather than a freeze period, you’re already taking advantage.
For more information – get in touch with us!
info@doitwise.com
+359 876 566 433
