A quality problem management program can eliminate recurring problems that impact an organization's productivity and increase support costs. Implementing problem management requires integrating tools, processes, and people to generate measurable results through data analysis, trend reporting, and ensuring follow-up actions are taken. The value of a problem management program is defined by the measurable benefits it provides and how it communicates resolutions to stakeholders.

1. “Benefiting from
a Quality Problem
Management
Program”
Eliminating recurring problems from Peter McGarahan
impacting the organization, President / Founder
employee productivity and
McGarahan & Associates
increasing the total cost of support.

2. About The Speaker
• 12 years with PepsiCo/Taco Bell IT and Business
Planning
• Managed the Service Desk and all of the IT
Infrastructure for 4500 restaurants, 8 zone offices,
field managers and Corporate office
• 2 years as a Product Manager for Vantive
• Executive Director for HDI
• 6 years with STI Knowledge/Help Desk 2000
• Founder, McGarahan & Associates (7 years)
• McGarahan & Associates delivers service and support
best practice consulting delivered through
assessment / findings / recommendations /
continuous improvement roadmap.
• Retired Chairman, IT Infrastructure Management
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3. 3

4. Problem Management – Break the Cycle!
A quality Problem Management program can reap many benefits throughout the
service and support organization as well as the business.
Many organizations still struggle with creating/maintaining an effective a
Problem Management program and process.
Problem Management greatly depends on corporate culture and the integration
of tools, process and people group to generate measurable and consistent
results. It takes patience, discipline, collaboration and analytical expertise.
Data Analysis and Trend Reporting are critical to the quality of the Problem
Management program, but it is the resulting action, measurable benefits and
communication to all stakeholders that defined the value of the PM program.
App. Network ITAP DBAs Desktop Service
Dev. Techs. Support Desk
4

5. Right Work, Right People & Right Reasons.
Know Call Types.
Speed to Resolution.
Reduce Customer Contacts.
Make Knowledge Work.
Provide Resolutions Close to Customer.
5

6. Service Strategy & Design - A Fresh Start
Design customer-centric services
that improve service delivery
(service level management),
enhancing the customer experience
through organizational flexibility, tool
integration, process efficiency &
people effectiveness.
Create a service strategy
Develop business aligned goals & objectives
Deliver service excellence
6

7. Self-service Level-1 Level-2 Level-3
$100 +
Technologist/D
evelopers
$50-$75
Cost
Escalated call
$18-$23
First contact
resolution
$5-$10
Automated
self-service
Categorize Call
Types in Level they are
Call
Resolved in
Elimination
Mean time to resolution
Bring visibility to repetitive, costly issues, questions and requests
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8. The “Shift Left” Structure
Characteristics: Business-focused, Virtual, On-demand, Cost-effective, Responsive, Predictable, Consistent and Adaptive
Level-2
OLA Specialist
Web/DB/
SLA Level-2
UC
Specialist
IS OPS Services
New
Customers Level-2
Customer Support Center
Specialist
Network & Technical
Services Level-3
Vendor Support
Level-2 Applications
Specialist
HELP@YOURCOMPANY.COM
QA/Security Level-3
Exiting Customers Vendor Support
www.HELPME.COM
Programs
Level-2
1-800.HELPME
Specialist
Business Portal
Services Level-3
Vendor Support
Infrastructure
Level-2
Employees Specialist
CRM /
Architecture
Level-2
Specialist
Business System
Services
Partners Level-2
Specialist
Bus. Analysis &
Process Services
Call Elimination / Increase First Contact Reduce Reduce / Eliminate
Self-service Res (FCR) Escalations Dispatch
8

9. Know Your Cost
• Require Analysts to search the KB before escalating to L2.
• Target call types for FCR that are currently being escalated.
• Target FCR for Self-service Portal.
• Analyze incidents with no Knowledge for PM / RCA.
• Work with L2 managers to provide training, access, and knowledge.
Source: HDI Practice & Salary Guide / Gartner Research 9

10. Either the time will be consumed with the “groundhog day” approach
to fighting fires,
Or spent in a structured and organized manner identifying the true
and underlying cause(s) of problems that generate calls and impact
business and eliminate the cause thus preventing future
reoccurrences.
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11. What To Do, Simply!
Step1: Finding the root cause of issues, documenting and
communicating the “work-arounds” to Level-1 & Level-2.
Step 2: Indentifying / Justifying a permanent solution or “fix” targeted at
the problem’s root cause, approved by Change and Released into the
production environment eliminating the incidents / calls caused by the
problem.
How the Service Desk Adds Value:
– Focus on accurate and complete incident record logging.
– Categorize / Prioritize accurately for easy reporting.
– Flag the escalated incidents with no workaround / knowledge.
– Analyze the high priority (business impact) incidents, the most
frequently escalated and the longest Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) as
PM targets.
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12. Root Cause Analysis
Start
Domain mgr.
IT M gmt.
rates candidate Assign
RCFA bus reactive
Incident impact and RCFAs at
records cost to fix as daily ops.
"large, med. Domain NWF (Not Worth Fixing)
meeting
and small" Mgr.
Problem Elimination
Board (PEB)
1. Review metrics
Create parent record End
2. Select candidate
RCFA admin.
incident history Consolidate
RCFAs and assign
RCFAs
to prob. owner
prepare
3. Investigate errant
Create metrics
RCFAs or domains
template
4. Ensure resource
RCFAs for
bandwidth is utilized Approved (and funded)
candidates
with high
incident rates
Change Mgmt.
INC LOG Techs Owner
Assembles team Establish Post work-
Prob
Define Submit Execute Verify
(weekly RCFA bus Root cause around (if
fix change change change
update req'd) impact determination applicable) successful
Submit intuitive RCFAs
IT
Incident Mgmt.
N Agent may submit intuitive RCFA
Match Enact work- Close
New Y Link incident
to open around incident
incident RCFA to RCFA (if posted) or route
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13. Purposeful Problem Management
Who in the IT organization is
responsible for critical problem Reduce Downtime
processes and resolution?
• Escalation
• Customer communication
60% • Documentation
50% of workaround
40%
30% Call Avoidance
20%
• Root cause analysis
10%
• Trend analysis
0%
• Problem review board
Other
IT Service
Process
not formalized
IT Operations
Responsibility
Team
2008
Desk
2009
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14. Develop A Response!
1. Develop guidelines for 5. Develop a plan for calling
escalating a problem. emergency meetings.
2. Ensure someone is in 6. Designate a "war room"
charge. or audio bridge.
3. Create a problem 7. Coordinate who will
management team with contact the customer
stakeholders from the with status, and how
service desk, often.
operations, app. dev. 8. Develop a severity
and business. coding system.
4. Schedule regular 9. Keep an updated "on-
meetings with team to call" list.
review outstanding
problems. 10. Hold a postmortem.
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15. Take Action!
Do you know…….
The desired end-result?
What works well?
What doesn’t, why not?
If you know, then what are you doing about it?
Find Out …….
Who is Calling?
Why they are Calling?
Who resolves their Issues?
How long (AHT / Effort / Resolve) does it Take?
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16. Categorization / Taxonomy
• Categories grow organically
– It’s easy to add a new one - even with change management.
– Categories are not organized and consistent.
– Don’t remove old or irrelevant categories.
– What ends-up in a categorization schema “decision-tree” may not reflect the true nature
of the incident / problem.
• Categories should drive reporting
– It is challenging to query and design reports for root cause analysis when you are sure of
what to ask but not confident in what you get back.
• Categories try to be everything at once / end-up being nothing at all
– Intentions are good, but relevance / simplicity to the support professionals who are
tagging the incident is absent.
• Categories levels when linked should tell the story
– Not knowing root cause, how resolved and what the symptoms are as expressed by the
customer leaves the problem manager literally blind when querying data for analysis /
action.
16 16

17. 80% of Call Volume / 20% Call Types
• Histograms that summarize recurring problems.
• Focus efforts on the most frequent issues.
– Problems coded incorrectly appear as individual and infrequent events not registering on
the radar screen and not given further attention (RCA).
– These seemingly unrelated issues, could be traced to a small number of common root
causes, and if grouped together, would have shown up as a high frequency problem and
therefore given higher priority.
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17

18. A Matter of Perspective!
• The creation of the categorization schema takes into account the following
perspective:
– The customer (REPORTER).
– The Level-1 Analyst (RECORDER / RESOLVER).
– The Level-2 / Level-3 technician (RESOLVER).
• Good Categorization leads to effective Root Cause Analysis which will
provide insights / action / results in the following areas:
– Trend Analysis.
– Knowledge Management.
– Problem Prevention.
– High Impact Training.
– Call Avoidance / Elimination Methodologies.
– Feedback loops to Help Desk training and Client Educational Programs.
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19. Targeting Call Types
• Know the Impact
– Tech vs. Non-Tech
– New vs. repetitive
– High call volume / High talk time
• Have a plan
– Direct to Self-service
– Publish Knowledge Articles
– Improve Training
– Route to Problem Mgmt
– Improve diagnostic / trouble-
shooting skills / tools
• Measure Impact
– Take baseline measurements
– Measure actual
– Report progress / impact / reduction
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20. Call Avoidance (Deflection / Elimination)
• Review historical data for persistent and
common problems (categorization /
RCA).
• Observe patterns of temperamental
infrastructure equipment (Configuration).
• Ask 1st, 2nd, 3rd level analysts and
business where they
see patterns (focus / debriefs).
• Communicate to employees well-known
issues and fixes (self-service).
• Develop strong processes (change and
release management).
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21. Focus on What Matters!
SLA = MTTR in 8 hours or less
for 90% of requests
• Develop measurements for Resolutions that Resolutions that
every component met SLA didn’t meet SLA
of SLA. Week 1 95%
• You can't improve what you Week 2 98.5%
can't measure.
Week 3 70%
• Use historical
measurements to observe
trends. WHY?
Focus on
# of Problems
Outliers
• Communicate SLA metrics
and measurements to ?1
business.
Time to Repair 21

22. Actionable Reporting
Fact with…
Analysis,
Action
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23. Create shared ‘devops’ goals / objectives.
In the end, these should help us identify, link and realize how to translate
IT objectives / metrics into tangible business benefits / value.
Work to establish measurable business value credibility.
1. Lower the total cost of ownership of all services
• Build them with serviceability, usability and maintainability in the design of all new
applications, systems and services).
2. Increase business value
• Achieve business benefits (lower operational costs, increased revenues, improved
customer experience).
3. Minimize business impact
• Reduce change-related outages / incidents.
• Reduce number of problems / incidents / calls.
• Reduce the number of requests / training-related calls / inquiries.
• Speed to resolution based on business prioritization model.
4. Improved and frequent Communication (Launch / On-going)
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24. In Summary!
Detect problems and trends
–Detecting recurring problems, analyzing trends, and
identifying areas in need of improvement.
Prevent problems (elimination)
–Performing Root Cause Analysis, determining the source
of the problem, will provide long-term
prevention. Preventing 10% of problems is the same as
solving 80% of all problems immediately.
Re-Solve issues
–When issues are solved quickly and efficiently,
productivity increases.
Position for Self-Service (deflection)
–Even though FCR is a great metric – it still says we are
solving a high percentage of repetitive calls – over and
over again!
–Position for self-service based on issue, question and
audience.
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25. Our New E-Book
"The Complete Guide to Purposeful Support Practices"
Best and good Practices in the support industry are
plentiful. These mostly process practices are guidelines
for focusing more on “what you should be doing” rather
than “how you should be doing it” with little to no
regard for the influential environmental factors.
Purposeful Practices are an innovative way to look at
these widely accepted processes with an emphasis on
achieving a desired, measurable end result. Purposeful
Practices are always open to investigation and
continuous improvement to increase the value of these
services to the business.
To download you copy, Go To
http://www.mcgarahan.com/custom.cfm?name=
bkform.cfm
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