Benefiting from a Quality Problem Management Program

Transcription

1 Benefiting from a Quality Problem Management Program Eliminating recurring problems from impacting the organization, employee productivity and increasing the total cost of support. Peter McGarahan President / Founder McGarahan & Associates

2 About The Speaker 12 years with PepsiCo/Taco Bell IT and Business Planning Managed the Service Desk and all of the IT Infrastructure for 4500 restaurants, 8 zone offices, field managers and Corporate office 2 years as a Product Manager for Vantive Executive Director for HDI 6 years with STI Knowledge/Help Desk 2000 Founder, McGarahan & Associates (7 years) McGarahan & Associates delivers service and support best practice consulting delivered through assessment / findings / recommendations / continuous improvement roadmap. Retired Chairman, IT Infrastructure Management 2

3 Pay It Forward 3

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5 Problem Management Break the Cycle! A quality Problem Management program can reap many benefits throughout the service and support organization as well as the business. Many organizations still struggle with creating/maintaining an effective a Problem Management program and process. Problem Management greatly depends on corporate culture and the integration of tools, process and people group to generate measurable and consistent results. It takes patience, discipline, collaboration and analytical expertise. Data Analysis and Trend Reporting are critical to the quality of the Problem Management program, but it is the resulting action, measurable benefits and communication to all stakeholders that defined the value of the PM program. App. Dev. Network Techs. ITAP DBAs Desktop Support Service Desk

6 Right Work, Right People & Right Reasons. Know Call Types. Speed to Resolution. Reduce Customer Contacts. Make Knowledge Work. Provide Resolutions Close to Customer. 6

7 Service Strategy & Design - A Fresh Start Design customer-centric services that improve service delivery (service level management), enhancing the customer experience through organizational flexibility, tool integration, process efficiency & people effectiveness. Create a service strategy Develop business aligned goals & objectives Deliver service excellence 7

8 Cost Self-service Level-1 Level-2 Level-3 $100 + $50-$75 Technologist/D evelopers $18-$23 Escalated call $5-$10 First contact resolution Automated self-service Call Elimination Categorize Call Types in Level they are Resolved in Mean time to resolution Bring visibility to repetitive, costly issues, questions and requests

9 Customer Support Center The Shift Left Structure Characteristics: Business-focused, Virtual, On-demand, Cost-effective, Responsive, Predictable, Consistent and Adaptive New Customers Exiting Customers Employees SLA HELPME OLA Level-2 Specialist Web/DB/ Level-2 Specialist IS OPS Services Level-2 Specialist Network & Technical Services Level-2 Specialist QA/Security Level-2 Specialist Business Portal Services Level-2 Specialist CRM / Architecture Level-2 Specialist Business System Services Level-3 Vendor Support Applications Level-3 Vendor Support Infrastructure UC Level-3 Vendor Support Programs Partners Level-2 Specialist Bus. Analysis & Process Services Call Elimination / Self-service Increase First Contact Res (FCR) Reduce Escalations Reduce / Eliminate Dispatch

10 Know Your Cost Require Analysts to search the KB before escalating to L2. Target call types for FCR that are currently being escalated. Target FCR for Self-service Portal. Analyze incidents with no Knowledge for PM / RCA. Work with L2 managers to provide training, access, and knowledge. Source: HDI Practice & Salary Guide / Gartner Research

11 Either the time will be consumed with the groundhog day approach to fighting fires, Or spent in a structured and organized manner identifying the true and underlying cause(s) of problems that generate calls and impact business and eliminate the cause thus preventing future reoccurrences.

12 What To Do, Simply! Step1: Finding the root cause of issues, documenting and communicating the work-arounds to Level-1 & Level-2. Step 2: Indentifying / Justifying a permanent solution or fix targeted at the problem s root cause, approved by Change and Released into the production environment eliminating the incidents / calls caused by the problem. How the Service Desk Adds Value: Focus on accurate and complete incident record logging. Categorize / Prioritize accurately for easy reporting. Flag the escalated incidents with no workaround / knowledge. Analyze the high priority (business impact) incidents, the most frequently escalated and the longest Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) as PM targets.

13 INC LOG IT Techs Prob Owner RCFA admin. IT Mgmt. Root Cause Analysis Start Incident records Create parent record incident history Create template RCFAs for candidates with high incident rates Domain mgr. rates candidate RCFA bus impact and cost to fix as "large, med. and small" Assign reactive RCFAs at daily ops. meeting Consolidate RCFAs prepare metrics Problem Elimination Board (PEB) 1. Review metrics 2. Select candidate RCFAs and assign to prob. owner 3. Investigate errant RCFAs or domains 4. Ensure resource bandwidth is utilized Approved Domain Mgr. (and funded) Change Mgmt. NWF (Not Worth Fixing) End Assembles team (weekly RCFA update req'd) Establish bus impact Root cause determination Post workaround (if applicable) Define fix Submit change Execute change Verify change successful Submit intuitive RCFAs Incident Mgmt. N Agent may submit intuitive RCFA New incident Match to open RCFA Y Link incident to RCFA Enact workaround (if posted) Close incident or route

14 IT Service Desk IT Operations Process Team Other Responsibility not formalized Purposeful Problem Management Who in the IT organization is responsible for critical problem processes and resolution? Reduce Downtime Escalation Customer communication 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Documentation of workaround Call Avoidance Root cause analysis Trend analysis Problem review board 14

15 1. Develop guidelines for escalating a problem. 2. Ensure someone is in charge. 3. Create a problem management team with stakeholders from the service desk, operations, app. dev. and business. 4. Schedule regular meetings with team to review outstanding problems. Develop A Response! 5. Develop a plan for calling emergency meetings. 6. Designate a "war room" or audio bridge. 7. Coordinate who will contact the customer with status, and how often. 8. Develop a severity coding system. 9. Keep an updated "oncall" list. 10. Hold a postmortem.

16 Take Action! Find Out. Do you know. The desired end-result? What works well? What doesn t, why not? If you know, then what are you doing about it? Who is Calling? Why they are Calling? Who resolves their Issues? How long (AHT / Effort / Resolve) does it Take?

17 Categories grow organically Categorization / Taxonomy It s easy to add a new one - even with change management. Categories are not organized and consistent. Don t remove old or irrelevant categories. What ends-up in a categorization schema decision-tree may not reflect the true nature of the incident / problem. Categories should drive reporting It is challenging to query and design reports for root cause analysis when you are sure of what to ask but not confident in what you get back. Categories try to be everything at once / end-up being nothing at all Intentions are good, but relevance / simplicity to the support professionals who are tagging the incident is absent. Categories levels when linked should tell the story Not knowing root cause, how resolved and what the symptoms are as expressed by the customer leaves the problem manager literally blind when querying data for analysis / action. 17

18 80% of Call Volume / 20% Call Types Histograms that summarize recurring problems. Focus efforts on the most frequent issues. Problems coded incorrectly appear as individual and infrequent events not registering on the radar screen and not given further attention (RCA). These seemingly unrelated issues, could be traced to a small number of common root causes, and if grouped together, would have shown up as a high frequency problem and therefore given higher priority. 18

19 A Matter of Perspective! The creation of the categorization schema takes into account the following perspective: The customer (REPORTER). The Level-1 Analyst (RECORDER / RESOLVER). The Level-2 / Level-3 technician (RESOLVER). Good Categorization leads to effective Root Cause Analysis which will provide insights / action / results in the following areas: Trend Analysis. Knowledge Management. Problem Prevention. High Impact Training. Call Avoidance / Elimination Methodologies. Feedback loops to Help Desk training and Client Educational Programs.

20 Know the Impact Tech vs. Non-Tech New vs. repetitive High call volume / High talk time Have a plan Direct to Self-service Publish Knowledge Articles Improve Training Route to Problem Mgmt Improve diagnostic / troubleshooting skills / tools Measure Impact Take baseline measurements Measure actual Report progress / impact / reduction Targeting Call Types

21 Call Avoidance (Deflection / Elimination) Review historical data for persistent and common problems (categorization / RCA). Observe patterns of temperamental infrastructure equipment (Configuration). Ask 1 st, 2 nd, 3 rd level analysts and business where they see patterns (focus / debriefs). Communicate to employees wellknown issues and fixes (self-service). Develop strong processes (change and release management).

22 # of Problems Develop measurements for every component of SLA. You can't improve what you can't measure. Use historical measurements to observe trends. Communicate SLA metrics and measurements to business. Focus on What Matters! SLA = MTTR in 8 hours or less for 90% of requests Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Resolutions that met SLA?1 Resolutions that didn t meet SLA 95% 98.5% 70% WHY? Focus on Outliers Time to Repair

23 Actionable Reporting Fact with Analysis, Action 23

24 Create shared devops goals / objectives. In the end, these should help us identify, link and realize how to translate IT objectives / metrics into tangible business benefits / value. Work to establish measurable business value credibility. 1. Lower the total cost of ownership of all services Build them with serviceability, usability and maintainability in the design of all new applications, systems and services). 2. Increase business value Achieve business benefits (lower operational costs, increased revenues, improved customer experience). 3. Minimize business impact Reduce change-related outages / incidents. Reduce number of problems / incidents / calls. Reduce the number of requests / training-related calls / inquiries. Speed to resolution based on business prioritization model. 4. Improved and frequent Communication (Launch / On-going)

25 Detect problems and trends Detecting recurring problems, analyzing trends, and identifying areas in need of improvement. Prevent problems (elimination) Performing Root Cause Analysis, determining the source of the problem, will provide long-term prevention. Preventing 10% of problems is the same as solving 80% of all problems immediately. Re-Solve issues When issues are solved quickly and efficiently, productivity increases. Position for Self-Service (deflection) In Summary! Even though FCR is a great metric it still says we are solving a high percentage of repetitive calls over and over again! Position for self-service based on issue, question and audience.

26 "Being a Service Leader is about positively impacting the world around you! It s not about you, it's about all that you can do to make other people successful. Thank You! Pete McGarahan McGarahan & Associates pete@mcgarahan.com