Organizational Alignment

Organizational Alignment determines the core health of a business.  If I am a client out there searching for a service provider of any kind, my first question to them and ask would be: what is their current level of Organizational Alignment?  A company without internal alignment cannot sustain a good relationship with clients, no matter how good their SLAs look.  The bottom line is that the quality of service does not begin and end with SLAs.  There are other factors in delivering a service that makes a service provider desirable or otherwise.

There are various models to adhere to when it comes to OA and one of the most popular is McKinsey 7S.  In this model there are three hard S’s and four soft S’s to align, within an organization and a metric to measure a service provider’s OA.  The hard S’s are: Structure, Strategy and System.  The soft S’s are: Skills, Style, Staff and Shared Value.  The Shared Value becomes the pivoting point for all other S’s.  

To briefly explain the S’s, Strategy is pretty much the plan of how this organization will be sustaining competitive advantage and successfully will compete in the market.  The Structure is about the way business units and divisions are organized.  The System, are the processes and the procedures followed by the company and employees.  Skills, relate to employee abilities and performance level as well as their competencies.  Staff, is concerned with what are the number of employees required and how they will be recruited, trained, motivated, rewarded, empowered, and last but not least understand the meaning of team-work and taking responsibility and ownership. Style, refers to the way company and the employees are managed, how they interact, what actions do they take, and the style of management; as well as the level of communication and support.  Shared Values is what the service company and the employees share as far as norms and standards that will drive their behaviour. The latter, of course, being of utmost importance, hence being pivotal to all the rest of S’s described.

My suggestion to any Service Provider out there who is planning to run a successful business with truly satisfied clients and motivated employees, is to take a hard and deep look into their OA and align their internal processes and procedures prior to advertising themselves to their very next client.  The steps are simple to follow and yet of course challenging. Here are the steps:

1.       Identify what areas are in need of alignment – Gap analysis – where are we now?

2.       The optimal design to be determined – where do we want to be?

3.       What needs to be changed for them to get there – management style, process, procedures, employees, equipment, etc.?

4.       Put down the rules and start an awareness program in which everyone becomes well-versed.

5.       Implement the required changes.

6.       Continuously monitor, enforce, review and improve.

The steps mentioned above will/may take some time, but it will be well worth the effort for a service company that plans to stay around and be favoured by many client in the years to come. Keep the alignment chart for your organization handy and let your current and future clients understand that there is a significant advantage for them to be dealing with you and you truly are the number one provider around.

I hope this has been useful.

EL

Event Leading to Incident Lifecycle

Many reasons of interruption or degradation of service levels are due to challenging events within the service infrastructure.  The event lifecycle is the period in which the infrastructure is being monitored for significant events. Problematic events typically bring about the incident lifecycles. 

The service events lifecycle is there to describe the sequence of events, that start with an infrastructure event and ends up impacting a Service Level Objective (SLO) not limited to hardware and software. If an event affects a Service Level, then we normally consider it an incident.

The event lifecycle starts with monitored activity of people, process, and technology including heart-beat status information.  The monitoring systems including the manual type, filter and correlate these events looking for critical information. The result of this effort is called: moderated alert. 

A Service Level Indicator (SLI) is a routine specifically designed to monitor SLOs and the attainment issues.  Typically we have a group of SLIs to manage the service infrastructure.  SLIs can be weighed or factored to represent the relative importance of each Configuration Item (CI). When one or more is triggered indicating a significant impact to the service, an incident ticket is raised, an impact/urgency/priority is assigned based on the Service Level Agreements (SLA) and the incident lifecycle begins.

Once the incident is resolved and the service is restored, the service impact statement is completed which describes the full scope of all impacts to the client of the service.  This statement is reviewed by Problem Management and assessed for accuracy with Service Management and Client Relationship Management to determine further actions if needed.  At times Service Improvement plans are spawned as a part of Continual Service Improvement initiatives due to the incident.   

All The Best,

EL

Service Catalogue

If you are a service organization without a Service Catalogue, you are like a restaurant without a menu.  This implies that any customer can order anything and the restaurant staff will operate in a reactive manner, any time, inefficiently to prepare the food and deliver a non-consistent food menu which may or may not taste good, and in a none cost-effective way.  

What would be the customer retention look like in a restaurant like this?  What would customer satisfaction look like?  Would they be operating efficiently? Would they know what to keep in inventory?  Would they be efficient in delivery? And so many more questions to follow an operation like this.

Creation of a Service Catalogue is the number one priority if you are a service providing company.  What do you offer? The cost of delivery? The efficiency of delivery? Etc…  The Service Catalogue talks to one or more descriptions of the services offered and perhaps future service abilities.  The customer will be using the Service Catalogue to request and negotiate the services and desired levels of service.  Going back to the restaurant analogy, it makes a difference if you decide to dine in, take out, or have it delivered.  The Service Catalogue then becomes our first level of entry in negotiations and the management of expectation.

The Service Catalogue is a member of a family of catalogues.  We have Goal catalogue in which we describe the entire Service Provider and Enterprise objectives.  We have Activity Catalogue in which all major activities are listed. There is Process Catalogue, outlining and documenting the cross-functional processes.  The Infrastructure Catalogue describes the pre-designed and proven infrastructure that provides guaranteed levels of service.

Keep in mind that a Service Catalogue is NOT a service portfolio.  Service portfolio deals with managing service as investment with a profit and loss perspective.  Service Catalogue co-exists to support the Service Portfolio.  A Service Catalogue can even be integrated with a shopping cart technology.  You might even decide on different Service Catalogues designed to cater to different audiences.  

A Service Catalogue contains a simple schema of: introduction; signatories; dominant contracts and governance; glossary of terms; positioning statement; features and scope of service; service level statements; management of standard and non-standard requests; change procedures and authorization.  

Behind the scene of course, will be a combination of content management, service order management, subscription management, shopping cart and reward systems, cooperating as a part of a holistic service management team. A Service Catalogue normally helps set or influence expectations, manage the customer and service provider encounter, and present a key moment of truth.  Keep in mind that a Service Catalogue runs the risk of becoming quickly outdated  and stale if it is not maintained and kept alive.

Hope this has been of some help.

EL