A New Focus on Service Delivery & Reliability

Too many infrastructure outages.  Too many caused by the infrastructure team itself.  This is the situation that a newly appointed IT operations executive found after he joined a major financial services firm.  Moreover, while the team prided itself on rapid restoration, there was little concept of actually improving the consistency of the service delivery itself.  He knew that he needed to shake up the culture and instill a broad sense of service throughout his team.

Breaking Down Consensus & Creating an Action-Oriented Culture

Utilizing our DeepRoots™ methodology, our team created an initiative to improve service delivery and instill accountability throughout the operations team.  One of the greatest obstacles was overcoming a “consensus culture” in which anyone had “veto power” – which typically resulted in stalled projects and inertia.  Assembling a set of cross-functional teams from across the operations unit and chartering them with mandates from the sponsoring executive, the initiative teams were able to rapidly identify operational gaps, decide on corrective actions and implement organizational and process improvements to improve reliability and accountability.

Owning the Solution

Within 6 months of starting, the initiative had achieved significant results.  Measurably, the teams were able to improve service delivery by:

• Reducing Critical Infrastructure Incidents by 85% through Adoption of Consistent Impact and Risk Assessment Criteria
• Reducing Emergency Changes by 92% through the Standardization of Change Classification

Most importantly, however, the team leaders took ownership of the on-going improvement process.  As such, they:

• Created several oversight roles to monitor on-going process performance and compliance
• Specific roles now have documented “accountability” for specific functions.
• Restructured metrics to enable operational management to self-monitor performance
• Established standing management “focus groups” to continually gather feedback, educate and reinforce service principles