Best Practice

We hear the term “Best Practice” on regular basis.  But if you actually ask what that is, most people will not be able to articulate a meaning and tell you what it constitutes.  So how do we know that we are accomplishing this?

 

To begin with, this is considered a method or technique that has steadily shown results greater to those achieved with other means, and that is used as a benchmark.

 

Scientific Management was developed by Frederik Taylor back in the 19^th century.  The studies were based on facts and not guesswork and estimation. Even though much of his philosophy is no longer favoured, he did introduce a way in finding business and production deficiencies, which is called the “Best Practice” today. 

 

One of the most important points to keep in mind in engaging best practice at all levels is process documentation.  Every organization has number of processes to be followed for effective delivery of their products and services. Trying to do this without proper documentation can prove to be hard in quantification, control and successful repetition.               

Documentation translates the tacit knowledge into explicit; and through this we become organized and make the processes useful to everyone.  Documentation is proved to reduce training time by 80% and increase the quality and productivity.

One special happening during the documentation of a process is that we find better practices to implement, as we spend time thinking about the current state.

 

To document the business process successfully, here are some hints:

·         Understand the scope of the process and the documentation,

·         Identify the key components of the process to be documented,

·         Write an introductory paragraph explaining why this process is important,

·         Define individual roles and responsibilities,

·         Outline the technical tools required for the process,

·         Write a step-by-step of how the process starts and completes,

·         Include an “exception” or “emergency” section,

·         Edit and proof-read to make sure the final product is easy to understand, yet professional.

 

 

Have Fun!!!

Taking it Personally

Taking responsibility in business if often mistaken by taking it personally.  To me they are two different subjects completely.  When you have your own business or are employed to someone else’s company, taking responsibility would mean that you see the project / process in hand through in the most efficient and effective way and do the best you are able to do under the offered circumstances.  There are no needs for someone to follow up to see if you are doing what you are supposed to.  You are on time checking pulse on your deliverables. You have the sense of ownership.  You take pride in what you do and it shows through delivery.  For someone who takes ownership of whatever they are doing, criticism – constructive or destructive, direct or implied, sincere or insincere – comes as just that; criticism.  They are not criticizing “you”, they are criticizing the outcome.

Fair enough, you are going to say, but I was behind the outcome.  Yes you were, but you are also forgetting that I said earlier: “do the best you are able to do under the offered circumstances”. The one who is doing the criticizing may not even be aware of what circumstances were.  If you take the comments offered “personally”, then the wall of defense goes up, you draw your sword and are ready to behead the criticizer. If you do not take the comment as a direct attack on you however, you would be willing to have a conversation to get to the bottom of it.

Unfortunately in many businesses “taking it personally” has become more of a trend.  In larger organizations you see the most tears shed and hearts broken when there is a performance assessment, or an award ceremony.  Sometimes managers are mandated to come back with couple of chosen ones from the team as a low performer, regardless of how they have performed.  When the manager relays the message to the employee, his/her confidence is crushed.  They try for days to talk about it to everyone and justify their cause.  They are disheartened and going to work in the morning becomes a chore rather than a pleasure.  At this point, they have taken the manager’s feedback personally. 

Remember that everybody’s opinion is exclusively the product of their own life and reality. Look around and you will see that it is always easier to get offended, have an internal fight, and or believe what they have said; than thinking about it, understand where it comes from and let it go.  It takes a strong person not to take things personally.  Hear what they say; accept it as a reflection of their little world; understand their level of self-confidence and self-reflection, then, let it go. Let it disappear.

This is also true when you seek advice about what your plans are.  You will hear a range of emotions come out from: “Wow! Go for it!”, to “Good luck with that”, or “You need to be more realistic.”

Does this indicate that the first person believed in you? Not at all.  This just means that they believed in themselves.  They did not have an issue imagining something of that magnitude.  To them it was an absolute possibility.  Likewise the others, were not trying to say “you” cannot do it; they were saying in their little world of reality, that cannot be done. It is not a possibility for them.

When hearing a criticism, an advice, an insult, or a praise, always reconnect back to your world and your awareness.  You are the only one who knows how true or false that is.  By taking things personally and taking their feedback to your heart, you would be doing yourself a huge injustice.

SMPO

It is not proper to view service management as a single project with a defined beginning and end, or something that you implement like hardware or software. Service management is a way of thinking and behaving that can start small and then expand incrementally to the entire organization.

 

Service management transforms an organization from a narrow focus on infrastructure and process to one that includes managing the services, experiences and outcomes. It needs the commitment and buy-in from leadership and executives, as well as all levels of management.

 

A conceptual organization called SMPO - Service Management Program Office - having the responsibility of supervision, coordinating and managing all the related efforts. SMPO can actually provide insight to risk issues and benefits of successful outputs.

 

SMPO represents few key interests:

-          Service provider organization

-          Customer

-          Service infrastructure

-          Service operations

-          Set standards for process design and documentation

-          Assisting in development of processes and procedures

-          Implement process governance and required corrective actions

-          Lead the ITSM tool selection

-          Spearhead standardization and integration

-          Outline functional terms of tool implementation

-          Develop metrics and reporting that matter

-          Lead continual service improvement efforts

 

Most organizations presently have people performing all or part of the above-mentioned. By bringing them together into a single service management program office they will have a better chance of a well utilized and established Service Management practice. 

Mind-Mapping

I love mind-maps.  If I just give you an idea of a project through mind-map, it would be: first start by classifying your major project tasks in a mind map format.  From this point onwards, you would be able to add tasks and sub-tasks and assign them to the project team, while creating completion timelines. It is always simpler to estimate the timeline for smaller tasks that encompass the major components of the project.

Mind map gives you a visual view of how the whole thing flows outward from the centre. Once all the tasks in the project are identified, then come the assignment to resources and establishing timelines.

If you have not already guessed it, this is the time to take care of your project chart. Now you will take the tasks on the mind map and add resources (people and tools) to them.  It will also include all dependencies, scopes, and allows you to create accountability for team members.

The mind-mapping method offers a difference and delivers with impact.  It is a good way to brainstorming of ideas, making action plans and presenting the whole thing in one shot.  I find them to be more stimulating at times of presentation.

You can use mind-mapping for just about anything.  Schedules, meetings, proposals.  You can draw connections between tasks and find out how everything affects each other in a visual way, which in turn makes prioritization easier.

To me, mind mapping is about consolidating massive amount of information, which creates a perfect platform for analyzing business requirements, making decisions, SWOT, Balanced Scorecards, and any business model you can come up with can be simplified and enhanced in this manner.  The radiating property of mind-map allows for boundless development of the ideas, while keeping a comprehensible structure; at the same time giving you a holistic snapshot. This can be useful in anything you do, process or otherwise.

Map Away!!!!

Productive Meetings

Meetings can be set to be useful, or completely useless waste of time.  I am certain you have all been to meetings where a lot is promised and nothing is delivered or achieved.              There are action items a plenty, which never gets followed up on.  These are meetings with no accountability.

 

As per research an average employee spends nearly one day a week in non-productive meetings.  Talk about cost cutting.  Just getting together and talking about what needs to happen, does not make it happen.  The tasks need to be assigned to an accountable party, with a specific completion date.

 

Few simple steps to keep in mind are: first, create and distribute an agenda ahead of time.  In your agenda also include if there are any projectors in the room, or if you are using products such as WebEx, or GotoMeeting, etc..

 

Second, during the meeting have the agenda displayed in a visual format of your choice and assign the action items to each person, discuss the timelines, resources, and comfort level, making sure there is no room for different interpretations of what is being asked.

 

Be certain to distribute the action items document as soon as possible after the meeting to all attendees and ask for their feedback to ascertain that there are no misunderstandings. 

 

Last but not least schedule a mid-line follow up meeting to talk about the same action items, as they appeared in your first meeting and understanding the status of each item. 

 

Running your meetings this way will bring about few benefits: your meetings will be shorter and to the point; you get results on what was promised; and everyone is on the same page.  You can conduct these meetings with the basic software available to you, nothing fancy required.

New Service Delivery Model for Cloud-Computing

Cloud computing has moved swiftly from being an idea to being deployed and used at a growing number of companies. As a result, the attention has shifted from how to implement a cloud environment to how to operate it effectively.

In majority of cases the companies needed to reinvent their service delivery models, the organizational processes, roles, and policies. What is interesting is that most companies have come up with the same basic model.  IT industries almost unanimously are looking to become more responsive to the needs of their clients.  They want to make IT a less of an obstruction to business initiatives, and increase the value it delivers.  There seems to have been three common challenges that most everyone has faced. 

1. The need to closely understand and manage the relationships across IT silos (servers, storage, network domains, etc.); due to the fact that cloud computing demands a more integrated and holistic approach; and unfortunately the typical IT groups today lack the organizational structure and processes to support this approach.

2. The old matter of: resistance to change.  Some of the resistance comes from application developers who are worried about job-security in the cloud-based automation of daily tasks; and some concerned about the limitations this might place on their input into technology decisions.   

3. The up-keep with the exponential growth of cloud-computing demands, having direct results on the technology’s success within the organization. 

As we realize, the traditional service delivery models does not address these challenges and it may even exacerbate the situation. In the old model, the IT organization is responsible for providing the business with a complete platform including infrastructure, middleware, tools, and applications and so on…. Then of course the IT is usually organized to many teams focusing on their particular component of the platform.  This of course creates silos that delay the cross-domain integration. 

At this point an “IT Business Analyst” works between the IT and business to deliver the platform to the business.  This body is pretty much responsible to represent the associated needs of the user and work with IT to ensure the delivery of the services and the correct translation of the needs.

As we all know of course the business requirements are dynamic, and hence the IT Business Analyst has to compete for attention in a time-constrained environment, which in turn in itself becomes a bottleneck in the process.

There is another method which requires no Business Analyst. Instead the users directly approach IT with their needs. IT then uses a series of demanding processes to understand and prioritize the overflow of requests. This creates low-value-added work to IT and limits timely and efficient response to the user.

So, both methods above in linking IT and User/Business, is slow in providing solutions. Users are frustrated in not getting what they want and IT is irritated by the mounting workload and the struggle to keep up.

As a result, these have been the driving force behind the development of cloud-environment’s new service delivery model that modernizes the interactions between IT and the user.

The new model includes three primary teams or roles:

•           The IT Cloud Team – being the heart of the model; usually a group of five or six who act as a COE (Centre Of Excellence) for cloud skills and knowledge.  The team members are selected from different IT areas, and also are people with knowledge and experience beyond their core field.  This team delivers IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) to users.  They create virtual data centres and construct service catalogues and images (Operating system, networking, storage, security resources), available to users; they also manage capacity, performance and availability.

•           Super Users – the receivers of the IaaS image; they are in position to help their peers use the cloud-computing resources.  They can even be a group of developers familiar with cloud image development.  They are actual end-users who have the technical skills to manage and work with cloud images. They also enhance the IaaS image into a PaaS (Platform as a Service) image for the business unit use, in helping their daily work activities. They will add whatever tools are needed by developers and business team. Once the image is completed, it will go into the service catalogue. They also allocate capacity within their business unit, determining the number of virtual machines to allocate to any given platform, or the number of images to be accessed by users, or how long they can be accessed, etc….

•           General Users – the consumers of PaaS images; these are the product developers, customer service engineers and so on, residing within the business unit who use the platform image to perform their daily tasks. General Users only interact with Super Users for their needs and not the IT team.

This model helps the organization overcome their key challenges with cloud-computing.  Hope this has been of some use.

Service Delivery

Service Delivery is the basis of judgment in any IT department.  Accepting the concept of proactive services when it comes to IT has some serious advantages. Instead of solely concentrating on monitoring and managing each component, we would be spending our time and effort on making sure that everything works harmoniously to provide a valuable and suitable service to the user.

Users are really always having been interested and concerned with what they are able to do; which is the end point of the Service Delivery Chain.  To a user, it does not really matter why the system is slow or not operating at 100%.  They are not interested in your explanations of things that have gone wrong with third party suppliers.  They just want you, to make the problem go away.

When you adopt an IT delivery system that is more service-centric, you are then starting to take control. You realize that no matter how good your IT department looks internally, you are only judged on the basis of what is delivered to the user. Once you start defining and managing your commitments and expectations in this manner, business-life becomes easier, seeing that you dodge all the issues that are caused by users defining what is acceptable, subjectively and unilaterally.

In summary, IT from the business and user perspective is all about service usage, whether anyone refers to it formally or plainly in this manner or not. We do not need to take on a major project to improve the IT service delivery.  Sometimes just a simple change of mindset is the most important thing. A few probable practices worth mentioning are in cross evaluation and training:

Make sure you have a few of your staff trained on ITIL specifically focusing on service design and transition.  This way they would be able to design an IT service that is both fitting the purpose and use.

Try rotating your IT development team and your operational roles once in a while, to give them a perspective on poor service design experience and consequences. Or send your front line operations to the business side for better comprehension of poor service operation.

Do a full process analysis to identify the areas which cause the most pain, and will provide you the highest relief if improved. 

 

Hope this tidbit has been of use.