Month: March 2014

Incident Management in a SaaS environment

Integrating your incident management process using a SaaS toolset provides dividends to the organisation.

An unplanned event happens in everything we do in life. Whether it is spilling your drink in a packed bar or a child announcing they need the potty while driving to a Sunday lunch meeting with their grandparents, life throws you curve balls. How we react to them is in our genes. So why do we have problems dealing with these curve balls when it comes to Incident Management in a SaaS environment?

John Kenneth Galbraith used the term Conventional Wisdom to identify obstacles to newly acquired information. Conventional Wisdom sees Incident Management purely through the prism of firefighting. It is not until we integrate other data and processes with Incident Management that the organisation can add value. Driving down costs per incident, reducing the number of incidents and increasing average revenue per user.

Software as a Service is not new, but now an accepted mode to deliver business solutions. It is time to change the way we think about it. Even large enterprises are depending utilising SaaS. The example of Salesforce is but one.

Salesforce offers an organisation integration of Customer Relationship Management in a virtual solution. Specific to Incident Management, Salesforce allows for rapid sharing of information, insights based on the customer profile, behaviour and previous incidents and resource collaboration when finding a solution. All actions are tracked and stored for future reference.

Salesforce is not without its challenges. For instance if you want to integrate with your legacy billing platform the organisation needs to be on the Enterprise version of the Service Cloud. The impact here is a direct cost implication of a per seat license increase in excess of two-fold. The shortcut of buying the Web Services API module will not give the organisation the benefits in my experience; you end up finding you have to buy more modules that eventually add up to the same price.

There are indirect costs too when it comes to integration. In my experience with one such Salesforce integration house, Appirio, development was on time and to budget. Appirio, or saaspoint as they were previously branded, were also able to leverage off functionality already in the license bundle I had. Great when you are looking at building integration with other service solutions such as Splunk, Qualys or Smartsheet.com.

The power provided by Salesforce is that you have integration and sharing. The shortcut is to use single purpose call tracking tools to do the same job. Long term this is going to cause problems. Without integration, all you are doing is being effective, but you are not bringing efficiency in to the loop. The organisation will end up expending the same effort in five years time to bring a solution to a problem. Efficiency in that case will only be achieved by experience built up by the user and that is efficiency that never truly vests in the organisation.

Collaboration without integration is not a sustainable service improvement cycle. All organisations are better served investing in what creates vested wealth than achieving short term wins.

To find out more email letstalk@tavne.com.

Managing virtual teams

virtual team

Managing a virtual team can be a lot of stress. Different time zones, different cultures and staff feeling that out of sight equals out of mind adds up to a dysfunctional environment. It doesn’t need to be that way. A virtual team can empower your organisation and here are some pointers.

In a blog post in Forbes last year, Sebastian Reiche, professor at IESE Business School, set out the ten tips to managing virtual teams. The post is well worth a read and points towards the importance of communications, team dynamics and good management practice irrespective of the location of the team. Check it out at http://www.forbes.com/sites/iese/2013/06/20/managing-virtual-teams-ten-tips/.

A recent report by the US Census Bureau noted that there are 13.4 million people, or 9.4% of US workers, employed on the basis of telecommuting at least 1 day per week from home in 2010. Professor Reiche’s tips are becoming more important to more managers by the day as we see that this is a 4.4 million increase in telecommuters from 13 years ago. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324539404578342503214110478

Down at the bottom of Prof Reiche’s is the kicker from my perspective, Managing Expectations. Although the article chooses to focus on the management of the employees expectations, this relationship is bidirectional. The business has an expectation of the staff that work for it. The only way to do this is through transparency.

In order to achieve this transparency there is a 1-2-3 that employers need to do:

1. Proceduralise the role

writing

Everyone needs to know what they have to do, whether it is the quarterback, the bus driver or the telecommuter. If you are part of a joint enterprise goals need to be aligned. A definitive set of procedures need to be in place for the team. They facilitate a common understanding.

In the case of service management, escalation points, service level agreements, major incident management processes and configuration management databases give the staff the commonality that is lost when there isn’t a water cooler to lean up against of a Thursday morning.

2. Make them live

Frankenstein13

Staid documents die on the shelf/document store you leave them in. The procedure for dog grooming in an ICT environment isn’t going to get much use. Nor is the procedure for opening up the office in the morning. If it’s not relevant, don’t have it on the books. Tasks that are working well organically do not need procedures; where procedures are needed is to guide staff through uncertain tasks.

When you have a procedure, give it to a member of staff to own it. Make it part of their quarterly or annual review that they update it, publish it and present it. It can be used as a training exercise for new staff or as a means of building a subject matter expert from the ground up. This is a loss of control and it may not go in the direction that you would envisage; but the manager’s role is to guide and not to dictate.

The manager’s other lever when making a procedure live, is the toolset. Modern SaaS solutions make a shared understanding easier. A mobile or virtual team can check out a KanBan board over a webcam. A task list from a project management tool such as Smartsheet.

3. Ditch the process

_LP

Don’t be scared to drop a process, procedure or toolset. Everything has it’s time, everything has it’s place. When a toolset becomes tired and no longer fit for purpose get rid of it. Processes eventually get in the way. We all know companies where the word process is synonymous with bureaucracy and not training.

Align your Key Performance Indicators with your processes and when they stop being important change both. If you don’t measure it, nothing will be done is the adage for KPI management. The inverse is also true, if nothing is being done, stop measuring it. If there is an outcry, you can always reinstate it.

Nothing will replace the one to one interaction of being across a desk from your colleague, but there are ways of compensating.

If you want to know more know more drop a line to letstalk@tavne.com.