Information Technology

<p style="text-align: justify;">A mature IT service management practice is detrimental to the functioning of your IT estate like a well-oiled machine. Today we&rsquo;ll look at five intricate areas within your ITSM space that need to be fixed to achieve your outcomes/ROI from this space and importantly, from your business of IT.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">The current era in business brings unprecedented challenges generating a need for future-proof solutions. With a global economic slowdown combined with other anomalies, CIOs are in the heat of making decisions that, in addition to being successful, now have conservative and more calculated demands. This can also be dubbed as a shift from rapid growth seen in decades to the more steady and consistent growth in the years to come.&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://kradminasset.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/ExpertViews/selvirajpic2.jpg" width="477" height="291" /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p><h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Do you Often have a Warranty Budget as part of your Release/Change Budget?</span></h2><p style="text-align: justify;">Without this, all changes brought into production are often thrown away to the existing operations that, in most cases, are stretched too far with the risk of snapping, making the production challenging to manage. Also, warranty budgets give the dictum to the delivery teams to meet the budget or deliver in best quality.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p><h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Does your Release Warranty Expire in time or exits on Meeting Threshold?</span></h2><p style="text-align: justify;">Warranty thresholds determine the production events caused by the new change to fall back to the pre-change volumetric KPIs. If thresholds determine this exit, your aspiration to add more change and technology can be done seamlessly and in style. Unlike the refrigerator in our house, whose warranty expires in time, we do not want the warranty for the change in production to expire similarly.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://kradminasset.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/ExpertViews/selvirajpic3.jpg" width="662" height="245" /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p><h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Does your Service Resiliency Charter often Cost you more Capacity?</span></h2><p style="text-align: justify;">This is a stereotype across many organizations. Capacity management or upgrades are just one subset of improving your service resiliency. Without fixing problems caused by people, processes, software, communication, etc., a capacity upgrade or technology migration would not yield the desired results. Your focus should fix all root cause categories trending in your problem management KPIs.&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: justify;">You want to make sure to take advantage of this because your service resiliency also contributes to your success in building/adopting new and advanced technology in your IT estate.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p><h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Conflict of Roles&nbsp;</span></h2><p style="text-align: justify;">Yes, you read that right!&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: justify;">In large organizations, the IT teams are a combination of different towers delivering different outcomes. Often, multiple suppliers are a part of this equation. That said, the nature of certain roles and the tower from which it operates can generate conflicts causing the overall health/ telemetry of your IT to look distorted when you zoom in to make sense of it.&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: justify;">For example, a production outage management team and operations (who restore the outage) working under the same tower/supplier often need to improve the credibility of the incident insights. Similarly, a project manager and the technical delivery teams from two different towers pose more severe challenges in many aspects of the project, the critical ones being the due diligence and the production impact study.&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Be smart, keep them where they are apt, and remember the phrase of operating like a well-oiled machine.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p><h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Supplier Management&nbsp;</span></h2><p style="text-align: justify;">Contract managers and operations managers (who consume the contract outcome) are brothers playing on a level field. If one function overrides or undermines the other, it will aid in creating complexities that will handicap the overall outcomes, and the problem itself will take a long time to surface.&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: justify;">With a level of engagement of these two from the time of drafting your contract to every review in the lifecycle, many costs can be saved and outsourcing effectiveness optimized.&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Does your HRIS prevent the contractor roles from rolling up to the respective functions within your organization in the org chart used to look up contacts?&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: justify;">This is worth fixing. First, it improves your supplier accountability and that of the internal teams.&nbsp;<br />&nbsp;<br />I hope this brief article sheds light on these five intricate areas. All complex problems are solvable in IT. It takes a leader to put the experts on the job. While this article focused on the concepts, automation is key to assessing, ascertaining, and acting in this space.&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: justify;">The author has two decades of experience in IT and is often dubbed as the IT Service Management guru in his assignments. With a background as a technical architect, the author chose ITSM out of his passion for delivering IT as a service. He has successfully operated large-size ITSM contracts for industry majors, and his expertise spans across everything from Service Desk and ITSM to large-scale IT operations. The author seeks consulting, Roles, and BOT opportunities and is also available for standalone Advisory sessions.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><em>This article was contributed by our expert Shiv</em></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p><h3 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Frequently Asked Questions Answered by Shiv</span></h3><h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">1. What are IT Service Management (ITSM) Tools?</span></h2><p style="text-align: justify;">ITSM tools help record, analyze, and act on production metrics. Importantly, it sets the workflows of the ITSM processes making daily IT operations easy and seamless.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p><h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">2. What are the outcomes of a good warranty?</span></h2><p style="text-align: justify;">Dual outcomes</p><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li>Ensuring a stable BAU service during multiple concurrences of production changes</li><li>Channeling the dedicated monitoring of the performance of a new change on production to aid random fixing, fine-tuning, and transitioning it to BAU</li></ul><p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p><h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">3. What are some critical ways to achieve improved Service Resiliency?</span></h2><p style="text-align: justify;">Multiple. Prod like testing for incubating releases, Top priority for fixing all root cause categories in problem management KPIs, a mature Release Management framework, etc.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p><h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">4. What are some of the supplier strategies?</span></h2><p style="text-align: justify;">In a multi-vendor IT setup, outsourcing contracts or approaches should also be based on a conflict of roles. Supplier reviews should have controls from both contract and operations management. Always remember the &lsquo;no one size fits all' rule.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p>