The Beginning of Good Process Implementation

Many organizations that I meet with often are struggling to implement best practice processes into their environments. They sound completely overwhelmed and often I hear “Where do we begin?” I smile and usually respond with “At the beginning of course”. The beginning of good process implementation of course is “defining and analyzing your customer’s requirements”. I once read that to provide good services a service provider must have good customers. I think this statement also holds true for processes as well. Good customers / employees must:

Understand the process
Understand the expected results of the process
Know where they fit into the process
Understand how they and others contribute to produce the expected results

When your employees understand the processes within your environment they can easily identify new customer requirements and positively respond to rapidly changing customer needs. This is the basis for making it part of the service culture within your organization, ensuring that business and customer requirements are always driving process enhancements.

The first step is to understand when change is necessary and then gather customer requirements for the changing business needs. This can take place through several mechanisms. It can happen in one on one conversation or through town hall type meetings. Some organizations have analysts who manage the relationship between the business and IT and meet with customers regularly to discuss these needs. Some industry standard techniques that can be utilized are:

Surveying customers
Conducting needs assessments
Creating and agreeing on Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Benchmarking

Customer surveys are a defined set of questions that help IT to understand the how our customers perceive the services being delivered. We want to define what they see as weakness as well as the strengths of the services and if their needs are being met. Is the service enhancing their ability to do their jobs? Value creation! These surveys can then be used to identify opportunities to create process improvements.

Next we can do a deeper dive by conducting a needs assessment. This can take several forms and, used in conjunction with our surveys, can lead to in depth and complete needs assessment. By trending data received from our surveys we can then focus further with direct interviews, documentation review and analysis and physical reviews such as formal tours or demonstrations.

Through the use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) IT and the customer can define and agree on the level of utility and warranty that will be delivered by IT to guarantee that the customers current and future agreed needs are being met. The service provider must also ensure that the underpinning agreements (contracts, OLAs) are aligned to the SLAs.

We may also want to do some benchmarking. This is the process of comparing your organizations practices and performance metrics to industry best practices and industry standard metrics. This can allow you to identify practices and processes in place at other organizations that can be utilized for improvements in your own organization.

Once all of this data has been gathered you can then begin to categorize the data and prioritize your opportunities and options for improvements. Requirements generally fall into four distinct categories:

People
Process
Technology
Information

From all of these activities a formal Requirements Definition document can be created to define a roadmap for your organizations journey forward.

Four Service Characteristics

Recently I came across several articles by researchers and experts that laid out definitions and characteristics of services. ITIL provides us with a definition that can help drive the creation of value-laden services: A means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks. An area that ITIL is not so clear is in terms of service characteristics. Several researchers and experts put forth that services have four basic characteristics (IHIP): Intangibility—Services are the results of actions not things. They have no physical presence and represent a logical set of elements. One way to think of service is “work done for others.” Heterogeneity—Also known as “variability”; services are unique items because of the mechanisms used to deliver services, which is people. Because the people element adds variability, the service is variable. This holds true, especially for the value proposition—not eve...

What is the difference between Process Owner, Process Manager and Process Practitioner?

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The ITIL 4 Best Practice Guidance defines a “Service Offering” as a description of one or more services designed to address the needs of a target customer or group. As a service provider, we can’t stop there! We must know what the contracts of our service offering are and be able to put them into context as required by the customer. Let’s explore the three elements that comprise a Service Offering. A “Service Offering” may include: Goods, Access to Resources, and Service Actions 1. Goods – When we think of “Goods” within a service offering these are the items where ownership is transferred to the consumer and the consumer takes responsibility for the future use of these goods. Example of goods that are being provided in the offering – If this is a hotel service then toiletries or chocolates are yours to take with you. You the consumer own these and they are yours to take with you. ...

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