For years ITSM has been done the same old tired way – Incident, Problem, Change and a little Knowledge – because that’s what we know. But it does NOTHING for our CUSTOMER – their experience doesn’t change at all.
This is no longer good enough.
Tying Service Catalog with Incident, Problem, Change and Knowledge changes the answer to the question, “Why are we doing this?”
Please join us as we explore the powerful links between these five, how this changes the way we think and how this can powerfully (and positively) impact the value your IT organization delivers to your customer and your business. It’s time to demand more.
As always, we will demonstrate these concepts in our constantly evolving view of a very advanced Employee Self-Service Catalog & Portal, built on ServiceNow technologies.
Recording with demo available at http://content.evergreensys.com/service-catalog-webinar-incident-problem-change-slides
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2. 2
Speaker Bios
DON CASSON, CEO,
EVERGREEN SYSTEMS
Don has led Evergreen
Systems since its founding in
1997. Over the years he has
spoken at conferences,
authored white papers and
been interviewed for
numerous industry
periodicals.
Contact:
dcasson@evergreensys.com
JEFF BENEDICT, ITSM PRACTICE
MANAGER, EVERGREEN
SYSTEMS
Jeff manages the ITSM practice
at Evergreen and has worked
with ITSM tools for 15+ years.
Jeff is an active contributor to
the Evergreen Blog and Twitter.
(twitter.com/JeffSBenedict)
Contact:
jeff.benedict@evergreensys.com
3. 3
Today’s Agenda
• About Evergreen
• Incident, Problem, Knowledge, Change
and…Service Catalog?
• Evergreen’s Self-Service Catalog & Portal (built
on ServiceNow)
• Possible Next Steps / Q&A
4. • 80-person U.S. IT Consulting Firm
• Worked with hundreds of Mid-Market,
Fortune 1000 Companies and Public Sector
Organizations
• Full lifecycle firm with deep ITSM / ITIL
transformation experience
• One of Top 5 ServiceNow U.S. partners
• Primary Focus – “Customer-Centric IT
Service Management”
4
About Evergreen Systems
Sample ClientsQuick Facts
5. 5
Traditional ITSM – Where’s the Customer?
Incident
Change
Problem
Knowledge
Self Service Catalog &
Portal
Here I am!
6. 6
Start With the Customer – Change What You Do
Self Service Catalog
& Portal
Change
Problem
Knowledge
Incident
7. 7
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
ARE WE LOOKING
THROUGH THE
WRONG END OF THE
TELESCOPE?
8. 8
Useful Grounding
Incident. An unplanned interruption to an IT Service or a
reduction in the Quality of an IT Service. Failure of a Configuration Item
that has not yet impacted Service is also an Incident.
Problem. A cause of one or more Incidents. The cause is not usually known at the time a
Problem Record is created, and the Problem Management Process is responsible for further
investigation.
Knowledge. The Process responsible for gathering, analyzing,
storing and sharing knowledge and information within an Organization.
The primary purpose of Knowledge Management is to improve
Efficiency by reducing the need to rediscover knowledge.
Change. The addition, modification or removal of anything that could have an effect on IT
Services. The Scope should include all IT Services, Configuration Items, Processes,
Documentation etc.
ITIL def…
9. Design From the Customer In,
Not IT Out
Design Management Needs
In From The Start
Give the Customer
What They Want to
Get What We Need Customer
Experience
Execution
Effectiveness
Governance &
Accountability
Balanced Design Principle
9
Build for the Providers Too or It Will Not
Work
13. 13
Problem
• A ready source of potential opportunities
• Analysis may be in progress, or even complete
• May already be deemed high value
The easiest place to start
Actions
1) Review current & past problems with Problem Manager. What are
the top 10?
2) Identify improvement opportunities – root cause & proactive
measures. Are there any logical groupings?
3) Automate / Eliminate through workflow & self service, other
choices.
4) Publish & Lead via Knowledge (improved process) or Service
alternatives.
14. 14
Incident
• The greatest aggregation of sources of opportunities – issues /
problems, queries, requests…but
• Organization of data usually poor
• Reactive, high volume nature of activity limits inspection
The biggest flytrap
Actions
1) Review top 10 incidents, queries & requests with Incident Team.
Ask open ended questions – be a Detective!
2) Identify top improvement opportunities – discuss causes &
possible measures to prevent. Think out of the box.
3) Automate / Eliminate through workflow & self service, other
choices.
4) Publish & Lead via Services, common Requests and / or
Knowledge.
15. 15
Incident - Mine Outside Sources
1. Macros in this project are disabled”
2. Solid Black Bar When Typing
3. Prompt to Save to Normal Template
Microsoft Word Logo4. Title Bar Flashes
5. Recovering a Lost File
6. Unable to open Word document
7. Typing, Spellchecking and Grammar Checking
8. Outdated Printer Driver
9. Inserting a symbol causes Word to crash
10. Fields Don’t Display Correctly after Mail merge
11. Applying Bullets and Numbering causes Word to crash
12. Mail merge with different data sources files
13. Word files open/save slowly
14. Toolbars and Menus are Missing
15. How to Move Autocorrect Entries between Computers
16. How to Create a Protected Document using Form Fields
17. Unexpected/unusual behavior in Word
18. Errors on opening Clipart/Clip Organizer
19. Errors installing Service Packs
20. Blank Word Document Contains Text
Per TechiWarehouse.com
TOP 20 ISSUES WITH MICROSOFT WORD
Clement Nedelcu's Development Journal
Sharepoint
17. 17
Knowledge
• Knowledge can become Share & Learn
• Direct, causal relationship to many queries and Incidents
IT’s undiscovered opportunity
Actions
1) Review findings from work in Incident & Problem.
2) Identify top 10 improvement opportunities – find and align
knowledge & community sources inside & outside the firewall to
enable self service for queries & problems. Identify top education
needs – lean in to educating your customers – lead them.
3) Automate / Eliminate through self service for queries / problems.
Use workflow / cloud to lead education.
4) Publish & Lead via Services, common Requests, queries, broad
search, enabling share & learn workspace.
21. 21
Change
• We are looking for high volume, low complexity changes
• Fragmented nature of activity can limit inspection and
understanding end to end
Where workflow &
automation shine
Actions
1) Review top 10 data gathered for clues. Meet with high volume change
processors. Ask open ended questions to mine for opportunity.
2) Identify top opportunities – discuss automation options, potential for use
of standard change & low risk change automation.
3) Automate / Eliminate through workflow, “change processor” self
service.
4) Publish & Lead with pre-built standardized and low risk changes via
Service Portal.
23. Closing Thoughts
23
• Customer centricity changes the value of Incident,
Problem, Knowledge & Change
• We are truly surrounded by opportunity – inside and
outside our organization
• “Top 5-10 of anything” makes the first bite manageable
• We are swimming in best practices examples in our
personal lives
• Share & Learn is a staggering opportunity for IT to
dramatically change its value
Hello all and thanks for joining us!
I am Don Casson, CEO of Evergreen and with me is Jeff Benedict who heads up Evergreen’s ITSM practice, and leads our Innovation efforts.
If you are new to our webinar series, welcome. If you are a past attendee thanks for joining us again. Our goal is to share valuable information & insights you can use in your planning and activities right now. The topic we will explore today is, A Day in the Life of an IT Service Owner.
Here is our agenda-
After a very little bit about Evergreen, we will dive into our topic – the relationships between Incident, Problem, Knowledge Change…and Service Catalog, which can help answer the question – why are we doing this?
Beyond that we will briefly demonstrate some of the concepts discussed in our always evolving view of a very advanced, self-service catalog & portal experience, built on ServiceNow.
Then we will answer some questions if you have any. At any time during the webinar you may submit a question using the Q&A function.
Evergreen is a US based consulting firm and we have worked with hundreds of mid market, Fortune 1000 companies and public sector organizations to improve their IT Service Management execution.
We are a full lifecycle firm, or in the words of one customer, “you have both process and technology in one company.”
We are one of the top 5 US ServiceNow partners and have over a decade of domain experience in each area of the ServiceNow portfolio, but we view all of this from a perspective of customer centric IT Service Mgmt.
At Evergreen we think Traditional ITSM thinking is just plain wrong, because it puts the customer – the people we are really doing this for – last! I am really jazzed about our topic today, because this and the next slide have been my call to action in past webinars, and today – we are going to focus directly on just this topic!
We need to start with the customer. The customer should get a BIG WIN in phase 1. Both the technology & best practices CAN support it.
So let’s get to it – Incident – Problem – Knowledge - & Change. If we start with the customer, it will actually change what we do.
If we really want to know why we are doing something – we start with whomever we are doing it for (our customer) and answer the question. Of course many of us in IT have been doing just like this lady – coming up with solutions that serve our needs and then expecting (or hoping?) that our customers will like them. We are looking thru the wrong end of the telescope. In the eyes of our customers, we look just as silly.
I have to point out one thing here, isn’t this guy’s hair awesome? It must be 6-7 inches high.
As we often do, covering a few ITIL definitions is useful for getting us on the same page. Four are relevant today – Incident, Problem, Knowledge and Change.
Incident is supposed to be service interruption or degradation of quality. For most, Incident is the front door of IT for the customer. They will call for not only interruptions but with questions and requests. For our purposes today – we are not changing the ITIL definition, but we will mean all in bound customer interaction when we talk about Incident. Problem is where we try to reach root cause for a worthwhile issue, and prevent or minimize its impact in the future. Knowledge is a store of relevant and useful information that can help our customers. Change is the process to control any modifications that could affect IT services.
Every service involves three constituencies - the Customer, the Providers and the Managers. All must be involved and have their needs met to create any truly viable service.
We recognize IT wants to deliver great services their customers will love, but they also want to reduce their own complexity and improve efficiency, accuracy, accountability, governance, and speed and quality of service.
To achieve these goals Evergreen follows an approach we call Balanced Design. If we begin by designing for the customer in a way that they love it and want to use it – we can also get what we want, and have it driven by the customer’s own self service actions. Give the Customer what they want to get what we need. The improvements we will talk about today should always be considered from all three perspectives.
At the highest level, we must re-engineer / simplify the work “end to end” for two reasons.
1) If the experience isn’t consistent, high quality end to end, the customer will reject it. We can’t just make the front page pretty and then drop the ball. – it makes customers even angrier. I know that sounds laughable – but if you think about the consistency of service delivery from the “silos” of IT in your business today, you probably just stopped laughing.
If we go to the grassroots level with our providers and really simplify & improve how our work gets done – then we’ll love it too. And we will lead the customers to the new way of doing business – thereby overcoming the big challenge of cultural change resistance together.
By focusing on the customer and the services they want and need – we can also transform IT.
The Whole motion we are talking about today is left shifting 1 to 1 human interaction, and replacing it with self service and workflow automation. From custom to factory like. We are looking for highly repetitive, high volume interactions of all sorts. Now this is high level, but Incidents feed Problem, and if successful Problem lowers incidents. Incident (inbound interaction) feeds opportunities for Knowledge, and successful Knowledge lowers Incidents. Change does have quite a bit of interaction with Problem, as half or more problems have a root cause of failed changes made in the infrastructure – and of course fixing them lowers future Incidents.
What we are doing is looking for opportunity, like detective work. We want to investigate these areas and make changes that improve the customer’s experience AND lower ITs work. Here is a process that can give some consistency to our efforts. We start with a broad approach to discover any possible areas for improvement, and since we can’t fix everything, review them for the highest value opportunities. Next we take those opportunities and look at the process end to end – how can we make it better / more simple? Then we determine 1) can we eliminate it through self service? And if not, can we dramatically reduce the work to do it through automation? Last – we have to publish it – get it out where it can be seen for consumption, and then lead our customers to it.
So Problem is the easiest place to start. It is a collection of thorny issues we are already trying to understand and prevent in the future. Right up front, its important to make it clear that many problem items may be too complex, or too infrequent to be good candidates for elimination or automation - what we are trying to do. But some probably will. So we know the opportunities are valuable, and may be well on the path to understanding and resolution. What we may find is, while we get to root cause – we may not be going the last two steps – really trying to automate or eliminate the issue, rather than creating more manual human based workarounds, and then leading the customer to different options / other choices that might eliminate the possibility of the problem all together.
As mentioned, for this webinar, we are thinking of Incident as service issues, queries and requests - all the inbound customer interaction. As such it is the always going to be the greatest source of opportunity for improvement. But it does have some thorns too – we can’t usually just walk in and say, “hand me a list of your top ten incidents, queries and requests over the last 12 months, by volume and type of user.” But a little detective work can go a long way. Interview some of the level 1 and even level 2 people. “What are the 5 things it seems like you are dealing with the most? What are the top 3 or 4 repetitive things you do all the time? What do you hate or like doing most? What do your customers complain about most? If you had a magic wand what is the number one thing you would fix? Number 2?” Then take that list and ask them how they would fix them, any ideas on how to eliminate this through self service, or by giving fewer but better choices to the customer? Then do the same with a few representative customers. This does work, and it doesn't take a lot of time. Next take the top candidates – improve, automate / eliminate, then publish & lead for consumption thru services, requests & knowledge.
Are there any alternatives to detective work? Or better yet ways to augment it? Absolutely. 80% of the software and hardware our customers use to do their jobs every day is commercial, off the shelf stuff – used by thousands of companies. So if we want to find out what issues matter to our customers, we can find them on the Internet. I did a google search on top 10 issues with Microsoft Word, and found this list, with a lot of detail supporting them from Techiwarehouse.com. A search for Excel issues yielded Clement Nedelcu’s blog, and knocking around the Microsoft website gave me the most common issues with Sharepoint. Cool huh?
Here are a couple more – both around powerpoint problems or how to’s. I learned something new – I didn’t know Wiki has a a site called wikihow.
I have a 2001 Suburban I have used for the past 14 years to haul a camper. I am pretty handy and frugal – a bad combination. A few months ago I had to replace the fog lamps on the truck. I ordered the parts on Amazon, searched on You Tube, found and watched a 10 minute video – and replaced the lights. Without the video I would not have been able to figure it out. With it – relatively easy. I probably could have gotten the same information just as easily from a Suburban 2500 users forum. I bet you have a story like this. But do your customers?
We provide hundreds of different technologies to our customers in our organizations. It is estimated that less than 10% of software features are used, on average. Does it matter how well people use their tools? We may make them easy to get – or REACT to requests for help, but does that meet our responsibility to the business? Doesn’t our mission sound something like empowering employees through technology to achieve competitive differentiation? I ask my customers, what are you doing to train people in on going effective use of technology? What are you doing to find, qualify and introduce new, innovative solutions that can make a difference in the value they deliver? While it may be different for you, for many the answer is, not much. Thinking about availability and reacting has blinded us to our real responsibility.
When will IT accept the responsibility for technical literacy? It certainly is a great opportunity to make a significant difference. Thinking of Knowledge as Share & Learn brings relevant information from inside & outside the firewall – from vendors, how to sites, user communities and other customers. It can change the value and power of self support because it is faster and better than we can provide ourselves. Our work in Incident and Problem identifies opportunities for us, against which we can align these resources inside & outside the firewall to eliminate work through self service.
Then we publish and lead by bringing our customers to a powerful and easy to use self service workspace to get what they need fast.
The vendor multi media learning support out there is phenominal. Adobe brings a wealth of interactive tools and training in this case for the Creative Cloud. Microsoft – tools that probably account for 50% of the average worker’s daily activities- offers a tremendous amount of multi media support for their software. Here are a wide range of training tools for Office, and a very active Microsoft sponsored Sharepoint support community.
The you tube example I mentioned before is how people solve problems and learn how to do new things. While we cant guarantee its 100% accurate, can we do that for the knowledge we create and offer? Community based scoring gives us pretty sharp insight as to what is seen as valuable and what isn’t – by the customers using it, and as long as it is active – we can even know if the information is stale or not.
I mentioned wikiHow earlier. This is a competitor to you tube in helping us. Their mission is “to help everyone on the planet learn how to do anything.” Pretty cool! I excerpted part of the technical areas they support on the lower right – phone & gadgets, software, operating systems – that all sounds like relevant stuff to me.
Last, what if we took it even a step further and created proactive, bite by bite curriculum to lead our customers toward technical proficiency – in the tools that matter to our business – 5 to 10 minutes at a time? Then throw in a splash of gamification and active internal coaches. Check out a site called Udemy – some call it the future of education. They now offer Udemy for Business – giving you the power to create an internal university for your business – by leveraging outside courseware and creating you own. On the lower right you can see three Excel courses - we know they are great, because they are all highly rated and used by thousands. Can your knowledge make that claim?
As mentioned, much of Change is complex and requires careful oversight. We often find 4 or so change types – high, medium, low risk; and standard – or automatically approved, normal kinds of day in day out really low impact changes. But this granularity isn’t always that precise. For example – many times we find low and medium risk changes going through a change advisory board review, treated with the same materiality as high risk. And we find that a lot of low risk changes could really be standard changes – automatically approved – and only going through change processes for compliance and audit trail purposes. So we can find opportunity in medium and low risk changes – pushing mediums to low and pushing lows to standard. And we often find good volume too, which makes it worth our while.
So once we collect our suspects, we identify the best opportunities, simplify and streamline the processes and then apply automation & self service (for the change processors) to reduce labor time and speed the work. For the case of Change, it really helps to have standardized, streamlined and automated workflow processes pre-built and ready for use, specifically for low risk and standard change types.
And now for something a little different.
While we are very intent on delivering beautiful Customer Centric IT Services, doing so brings a dangerous Achilles Heel with it. Let’s say you bought a receiver on Amazon and it was a great experience, then you tried to buy a tent and it was horrible and completely different, would you say “parts of Amazon are great, and other parts – not so much.” Or would you say, “Amazon stinks.” You would say it stinks. So when you aim to deliver customer centric IT you raise the expectation bar, which is very dangerous. You’d better be ready to meet it – across the board, day in day out. This is the other side of the coin.
Evergreen is working very hard on this – we call it the Service Manager’s Workspace. Here’s a quick look at what we have been developing – and give you as part of our solution, out of the box. It’s not just a dashboard, it’s more like a cockpit – like flying an airplane – you need both reactive and proactive ability. It becomes the workspace where the Service Manager goes to reactively AND proactively manage their service every day. Today it includes information on customer satisfaction, service quality, service availability and service delivery. We are working to add more proactive measures like the ability to directly interact with customers on feedback, easily see service workflow end to end, be able to propose changes to the service from here – that then go thru change control; and to be able to update and enhance features and options directly – right from this space.
Customer centricity absolutely and dramatically can change how we see incident problem knowledge and change.
In the words from Russell Conwell’s famous book, “we are sitting on acres of diamonds.” There is great opportunity all around us.
Starting with the top 5 or even 10 isn’t all that hard – so we ought to get going, and there are best practices examples all around us.
Last – turning knowledge into share & learn is a wonderful opportunity for IT to change the value it provides.
If you found this interesting and wonder what might be a logical next step, here are a few options.
If you are interested in our advanced Self-Service Catalog & Portal, it is now available as a self-service demo. You can get your own login on our website – follow the front page banner.
If you are looking for a better way to organize and categorize services – you can access a short demo video of our Service Taxonomy Mind Map application on our website.
Or perhaps you are considering a broader Service Catalog initiative but aren’t sure where to start. Evergreen offers a one day, private Service Catalog Workshop on your site for up to 15 attendees. It is designed to educate your team, uncover key business drivers & roadblocks, and create a common language and direction - to get your team on the same page. You can literally save months of effort in consensus building and get your program moving. We feel like it’s a real value at less than 4 thousand dollars, including travel.