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Showing posts with the label Service Delivery

Then and Now – Site Reliability & DevOps

In the past, the idea was to build in the non-functional requirements of service to the best of our ability based on experience or best guess. Sometimes the general thought was, “We will worry about any residual work for availability, capacity, and reliability after the product or service is deployed”. This focus ensured that the product was fit for purpose, but did not ensure that the product was fit for use, that it was reliable. This approach is very costly to the operations of the service and negative consumer impact impedes opportunities for market share.  This type of focus also creates silos between Dev and Ops and Ops become firefighters.  The costs for operations are not sustainable! In addition to loss of revenues, staff morale begins to slip.  So, reliability is really the key to success. Think about your cell phone. A heavy focus on functional requirements would mean that you can make phone calls. You can text, you can  take photos, you can use your maps and a variety of

Improving IT service outsourcing experience: The magic of bringing XLAs & SLAs together

Our friends over at CitrusCollab shared this really interesting case study: Improving IT service outsourcing experience: The magic of bringing XLAs™ & SLAs together Business Situation A regional utility company with 10,000 employees was ending a first time, multi-year IT infrastructure outsourcing contract with a well-known, sizeable India-based outsourcer. At the termination of the contract, the client was extremely unhappy with: the lack of service quality, the lack of promised innovation and cost reductions, the poor employee experience with the technical services delivery quality, the unacceptable governance experience with the management of disputes and issues, the ineffectiveness of financial penalties as a lever to obtain service performance improvements.  CitrusCollab consultants assisted in the outsourcing contract rebid process. We created several Employee Experience Level Agreements (XLA*) to augment the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for the new IT Infrastructur

Value Elements

When discussing the elements of value creation through the delivery of services we always talk about customer preferences, perceptions and the business outcomes they generate.  We also throw in the elements of utility and warranty.  These are all critical in ensuring our ability to create value for our customers and capture value for ourselves as service providers. The service relationship between service providers and their customers revolves around the use of and interaction of assets.   Assets are made up of both resources and capabilities and are provided by both the service provider and the customer.  These are critical value elements in the creation of usable, customer aligned services. Many of our customers utilize our services in conjunction with their own assets to then build and deliver services or products our customers then deliver to their customers. We, as the service provider, consider these customer assets.  Without these there would be no basis for defining th

Process Maturity

So unlike the Billy Joel lyric “Love you just the way you are”, we can never be satisfied with our processes being just the way they are.  As the organizations that we are engaged by continually change and mature to meet customers dynamic requirements, our processes must be continually assessed, measured and matured to ensure that they stay relevant and deliver value long into the future.  This takes real time, effort and resources.  Organizations cannot possibly move from being informal or ad-hoc to having a fully integrated ITSM program in a short period of time.  Just being able to gather the correct components (people, process, technology and information) can be a lengthy process and, of course, there is the decision of which processes do I begin with. The saying “Rome was not built in a day” really applies in this situation.  We must begin from the perspective that each level of maturity forms the foundation for the next level of maturity. Trying to jump over levels will almo