Facts
- CIO objective to redeploy/release 15% of their IT support headcount over 2 years.
- Senior Management did not have deep visibility into the workload distribution of the support teams/staff.
- Lack of scientific approach to demand management and daily workload allocation.
- Operational Metrics were mostly looking back into past rather than looking forward to take up preventative actions.
- Support staff would get work requests from outside of official workflow or project management systems.
- Underutilization of data that were captured in different transactional systems.
Results
- Reduced ticket processing time from 3.5 hours per ticket to 1.5 hours per ticket within 6 months.
- Streamlined ad-hoc work allocation from 43% to 2% of the team capacity.
- Developed a catalogue of all tasks done by the teams, and competency levels of each staff to perform those tasks.
- Developed detailed planning models to capture workload demand and capacity to deliver that demand.
- Developed weekly operational dashboards that clashed data from multiple systems.
- Coached the staff to use the dashboards every week and implement corrective action plans.
- Introduced A3- based problem solving methods.
What was at stake?
The IT Management of the company wanted deeper understanding of the work done by their technology services teams and help them identify opportunities for reducing support budget.
What was the result?
With Expertivity’s help and support, the IT Support teams were able to step away from perception based capacity management, to a data driven, evidence based approach, thereby delivering cost savings expected by the management.
Background
The client is an insurance organization going through a major transformation in their IT organization. They have targeted a 35% cost reduction over a 2 year period with a significant portion has to be delivered in year 1. They also wanted to develop a gatekeeper/ lean management approach by Team Managers, where the quality of input, the relative priority and the quantification of demand on the team is considered. Commercial awareness was one other weakness with cost of service not being a KPI for the teams. In fact, SLAs of top priority incidents were the only measures seen of importance, and every other measure was seen as sub-servient to this.
What was the process?
Expertivity worked with the team managers using a 24 step/5 milestone program, where a significant milestone was achieved every 3 to 4 weeks, until the result sought by the senior management has been achieved. There was a combination of historical and current data analysis, iterative macro and detailed demand and capacity management model development, assessments of systems capability and integration to deliver and sustain the result.
What were the results?
The Expertivity team worked with the Support team members and their team leaders to gain an understanding of the day to day activities they were completing, and their key role in the process delivery. Valuable insights were obtained in relation to how the teams allocate work and the challenges they face when they get work through informal channels. Until Expertivity came in, the teams looked at their data in isolation which showed a very positive image, but didn’t help discover the problems they were facing. Expertivity team established a cadence of Weekly Operations Dashboard that clashed data sets from different transactional systems and presented KPIs such as time taken per ticket, closure rate, tickets that took longer than reasonable expectations, work coming in from outside the formal routes. These metrics helped the team to take decisions to reduce their costs, and sustain to operate at that level. The team also were introduced to use priority decision matrix to discover critical opportunities for improvement, and to a structured problem solving methodology to implement high priority opportunities.