Situation
The IT organization of a growing retailer with more than 16,000 employees was struggling to define and execute Service Level Agreements (SLA). Because they lacked mature SLA guidelines, the team found “work-arounds” to help improve the perception of their internal customers. Within their own organization, there was confusion around responsibilities in their service catalogue. This increased the cycle time for completion of requests. There was a critical need to put in place standard definitions of processes and operations to benefit the way IT supports the Help Desk and to improve the experience of the customer.
Solution
BusinessForward defined the Help Desk services that the IT team was providing, which then enabled a streamlining of the way they interacted with customers. We designed technical and functional requirements for a new Help Desk ticketing tool and conducted a capacity analysis.
As part of a task rationalization, we reviewed the scope of work in place with a vendor who was handling just 10% of outsourced Tier 1 support. We determined that the most appropriate work or complexity relative to person’s position was out of alignment for the best service. By reorganizing items into more Tiers, outsourced tasks were increased to free time for the team. This also created time and space for more proactive initiatives and allowed senior-level team members to analyze and quantify service and understand areas for more cost and time savings.
Results
The IT team benefitted from a number of outcomes resulting from our IT Process and Policy Optimization solution. These included:
- They are now meeting SLAs and expectations as promised
- Reduced volume of tasks, creating more capacity to enable senior resources to be more effective
- Streamlined cycle time