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Safeguarding your infrastructure with our best practice approaches to service transformation
Your organization has been built on efficient and effective IT systems.
As these systems grow and age however, the chances of infrastructure and service failure increase, with increased risk of customer service failures, reputational damage, and reduced profits. It’s essential your IT and service infrastructure is reliable, accountable and well-managed - and remains that way.
Service transformation will look different for everyone, this is our Marval approach focused on understanding best practice and what’s at the heart of your organization.
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Traditional IT Approach
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Marval’s ITSM Solution and Good Practice Approach
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Technology Focus
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Service and Process Focus
While technology is a vital element in service transformation, it must never be adopted in isolation; it needs to be balanced with the right people and processes.
Only by understanding the big picture of organizational goals and structure, can effective processes and procedures be defined clearly. The right processes will be repeatable and scalable, saving your organization time and money as well as reducing risks. By documenting and following these processes, your organization will:
- Ensure a better-quality, consistent and efficient service
- Create a resourceful environment with more productive personnel
- Increase confidence within your support team(s)
- Build the confidence of customers
- Remove dependence on individuals - and their memories
Provide a baseline to enable the measurement of improvement. |
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Proactive, preventative and with continual service improvements
‘Fire-fighting’ to resolve unexpected issues can feel like a constant battle, but many of these fires can be avoided by planned preventative maintenance activities and process improvements. Embracing a culture of continual service improvement will support your organization as it continually adapts to changing markets.
Ensure your IT support team have the customer service attitude you need, enabling them to provide a professional proactive approach. Your first step should be breaking down barriers, and building relationships between departments, groups and customers. |
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Isolated Silos
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Integrated Service Delivery Team
A common issue within many support departments is the structure. By creating silos, a holistic view of activities across the organization as a whole is unclear. To realize business benefits and goals, these silos need to be broken down creating an integrated service delivery team which can provide actionable intelligence, greater control and enhanced performance.
Start by improving communication between teams responsible for delivering each end-to-end process. Mapping processes across silos will identify those delivering each aspect of the service - from those providing operational infrastructure to end-points accessed by your customers.
Agreeing common methods of working which encourage collaboration will require:
- Communication groups
- Operational agreements between teams
- Escalation points
- Common process workflows
- Cross-team reporting, particularly focusing on operational exceptions.
With a service management application holding all the information as a single source of truth, demonstrating business benefits will be much easier.
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Informal and Ad-Hoc
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Repeatable and Accountable Governance Model
Customers expect services that are fast, reliable and repeatable, ensuring consistency and availability whenever and wherever they are needed. An effective governance and compliance model will bring organizations standardization and consistency, while also increasing reliability, security and risk mitigation.
Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) as a practice, needs to be driven by the board level, ensuring accountability throughout the organization - including IT. All areas will then understand and manage risks effectively, producing value to stakeholders, delivering a sustainable bottom line and meeting compliance requirements. It is essential for all areas to use and understand a common framework.
Strong governance and compliance will also support robust security - with access controls, audit and management information - as well as improving customer service experiences in all services.
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Internal IT Perspective
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Business and Service Aligned
Within IT it can be common to see a ‘blinkered’ approach - narrowing the vision of the department’s role instead of understanding its place supporting the whole organization. IT departments are a strategic asset, integral to the business and contributing to organizational success - and profits. It is essential those teams understand how their activities support the business’ needs by:
● Being fully aware of current key business drivers, issues and constraints - IT should be part of a wider business steering committee
● Establishing business-focused Key Performance Indicators - through regular business relationship managers, ideally IT teams will have nominated Business Relationship Managers to interface with the organization
● Having a budget to actively develop appropriate skills and knowledge in an ever-evolving environment
● Understanding and completing business-focused activities with an ‘IT Mission Statement’ supporting that of the organization.
● Meeting service level and operational level agreements and highlighting areas where improvements are being made.
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Operational Metrics
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Service Based End-to-End Metrics
Ensuring business goals are met requires successful departments to understand, measure and analyze key services and processes. By detecting deviations from expected results early, changes can be implemented before the organization is adversely affected. To achieve this, metrics aligned to business services and goals should be the focus and can be achieved by:
- Measuring and reporting on relevant services
- Creating valid, meaningful reports to inform management decisions by recording and classifying all requests
Stop producing reports which are not providing information useful to guide business decisions.
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