Service Matters! ITSM & IT Management

Posted by Anurag Bahal, Senior Consultant, Infosys

Purpose – Accomplish more from corporate meetings

The Matrix is my favorite movie. It has an advanced technology depiction with an underlying philosophical message. Technology and Philosophy, what a cinematic combination! Morpheus, Neo's spiritual leader and guide tells us in The Matrix "Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony”. I have seen that organization meetings have a fate and the irony is in the participant behavior.
Being a consultant I organize meetings and I am invited to a quite a few Business and Technology meetings. There are many instances where I feel that meetings can be organized better and then they could have achieved better results. One theme that I have found particularly challenging is the chameleon factor.

Meeting Dynamics – The Chameleon Factor
People change colors when they start viewing a situation territorial. To give an example, say a consultant wants to complete a project by a certain time to meet the client acceptance criteria but the political situation in the client site prevents him from doing so. There are people who are ready to cooperate with the consultant in person but when they come together they are interested in increasing their own areas of influence and cite problems with the work done in other area. In this situation it becomes a matter of taking a few steps forward and then a few backwards. Progress is slower. I have been part of the meetings where people start making a generic comment and they admit that they are making a general comment. Little that they realize that comment can impede a full buy-in. The outcome of that comment is that prevents a complete sign off of the deliverable and worse it is not actionable. Moreover a few days later the stakeholder is ready to change the comment to make it specific but it is contradictory to the earlier stance that was taken in public. All this is a part of corporate reality but my point is that a general comment is of no value and it is a time waster.

Meeting Dynamics – The Solution

How about using the advice of Sidney Poitier (Actor and Author of The Measure of a Man) in order to accomplish more from every corporate meeting. Here is the advice "Living consciously involves being genuine; it involves listening and responding to others honestly and openly; it involves being in the moment."

If people are consistent and genuine in their expression in the corporate meetings, it creates better outcomes. Successful managers know that and they practice it. They highlight inconsistencies and provide suggestions to fix those. Successful meetings are very important to the real success of a project. As Morpheus puts it in The Matrix "What is "real"? How do you define "real"?" Real to me in the organization meetings is Action that produces outcomes as warranted by organization strategic goals and drivers. If your company has invested in a consultancy effort, they want the effort to conclude in schedule, scope and budget.

So what are you doing to help consultants in your company complete their work in time?

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Posted by Anurag Bahal, Senior Consultant, Infosys

What do rising gas prices, increasing food prices, rising sub-prime losses, lay offs and slow economic growth have to do with Industry best practices on Business-IT Service management?  The trends mentioned above are monsters facing the US economy. These trends are shaking the senate, the US corporations and the consumer behavior. As a consequence, the consumers have started to look for cost effective products and purchase experience.

Amazon is one such experience that enables customers do shopping sitting in the comfort of their homes and get the best deals. A few days back there was an outage reported in Amazon site. It was followed by another outage. In the times of recessionary economic trends these outages can cost the company millions of dollars of potential revenue. Because people want to buy on-line but they are limited by the system availability.

Applying the best practices of ITIL can minimize such outages and possibly eliminate them. The key is not to fall into the hype of ITIL but adopt simple but effective processes. We are close to the first birthday of ITIL V3.0 and I am happy to say from my experience of being involved in the genesis of ITIL V3.0 that ITIL can help companies avoid business losses from system outages. 

Using tight and light processes any company can benefit from the industry best practices developed by OGC. I call it risk proofing the business. A bit of Service Strategy, Active monitoring, systemic resolution and continuous improvement processes creates that shield to the business. The solution is not only about recovering the business loss from the site providers as a penalty to the outage which is the most common interpretation; it is much more than that. I am a part of a practice in Infosys that specializes in IT Service Management and following are a few steps that we recommend

• Creating an IT Business Alignment and for an online business, IT is the business so it is all the more critical to create that alignment.
• Creating a strong IT Governance structure and have control processes, structure and reporting that support the Business IT alignment

Another example of how ITIL V3.0 can help the end customers came when I was talking to a colleague of mine and esteemed fellow blogger, Ramshankar Ramdattan, and he had to say that applying ITIL V3.0 is like car pooling on a corporate level. When we ardently manage IT capacity we are ensuring that assets are used and reused to ensure overall containment of costs. This way the corporate spend is controlled and it results in better profits. This profit can give leeway to a company to pass the benefit to its customers who then pay less to buy more.

Coming back to the rising gas prices, I do not know where the stop is? $5 or more but we know that in these times applying industry best practices like ITIL can create a counter pressure on the burgeoning costs.

 

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- Anurag Bahal, Senior Consultant, Infosys

How do we create a common language of Communication and create Team Synergy using metrics?
America’s first billionaire J. Paul Getty said it “I would rather have one percent of efforts of a hundred people than a hundred percent of my own efforts”

Communication - So often when things go wrong, we blame it and classify it on a failure of organization communication. We attribute the underlying fault of poor communications to the organization as a whole. This may be true, but employees – the individuals within the system – also share some of the blame. They have not used metrics to their advantage. Managers are busy; they have many tasks to accomplish within a short period of time. Therefore communications, other than a follow up on a previous quick to-do list issued and assignment of a new To-do list suffices for conversation. Successful organizations strive for transparency and inclusion. Metrics can create an atmosphere of transparency and drive away negative behavior. Here is a potential situation. Say you discover information that will help solve a critical problem in your company. You may wish to share it, but your boss is not keen. Why? Because the information you hold will help a political rival of his. Or the information can be used against that team and its manager. So what can you do about this problem?  Use a metrics connection to create a win- win situation for your boss and his adversary. Show how your information will benefit the KPIs of both the managers and highlight only that benefit with the respective manager. In every situation there are common themes and related metrics like customer satisfaction, increased productivity, reduced defects, etc. that will do the trick.

Team Synergy. Since people will like to do their own things, there is a need to align them. Align all the ducks in the same row so that they dance together and play together to a beautiful melody. As Citibank ex chief Sandy Weill once put it “When the music is on you got to dance”. The dance won’t look good if the ducks are out of pattern. One way to get the team in pattern is to create a team synergy metrics. Here are a few examples that I have seen working from my experience.

1. Team artifacts produced together
2. Number of conflicts and disagreements
3. Criteria of decision making in every conflict instance
4. Number of meetings conducted
5. Number of attendees in every meeting

Share this information with every team member and ask for feedback. Keep management interested and get them talking using these metrics. Use metrics appropriately depending on the inkling of the manager but always have them.
My experience says that if there is one thing that people like in the corporate world, it is Transparency and there can not be any excess of this. Communication issues will be with us always but providing transparency enables individuals to exercise ownership of their problems and in this manner solutions can be found, one person and one team at a time.
The answers to this and similar problems may lie in the metrics and performance management system. What issues are you and your company addressing in your next process improvement project? Keep reading the blog to find a metricized answer.  

On the quandary of measurement, here is an interesting article that I read recently

http://www.jrothman.com/Papers/Cutter/Whattomeasure.html

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