Information Technology Services (ITS)

Service delivery process transformations & client survey

Published on: March 19, 2024

Service delivery process transformations

In March 2023, the 12-person group of staff and managers in the Systems and Solutions Group in Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS-SSG) implemented several service delivery initiatives to improve client experience.

These initiatives centred process and workflow optimization, leveraging industry standard frameworks and methodologies including ITIL4 and Agile project management to move us closer to our goal of operational excellence.

How did we do?

If you are an EIS-SSG client or partner, please take five minutes to tell us about your experience of our services since these transformations.

System and Solutions Group client survey 2024

Highlights

For more details, check out the service delivery process transformations video (40 minutes).

Key takeaways:

  • Recovered 83 hours per week on request intake and ingestion
  • Reduced average resolution time by 30 per cent
  • Increased average tickets resolved per week by 18 per cent
  • Expedited infrastructure project work
  • Empowered staff and facilitated time-savings for managers
  • Developed hard and soft skills in ITIL4 service delivery

Background:

  • 2021 EIS external review
  • Identified priority objectives for furthering maturity:
    • ServiceNow (ESC)
    • ITSM best practices
    • Consistent & measurable
    • Service delivery & client experience

How did we do it?

  • ServiceNow (ESC) migration as primary intake method
  • Learning (incident management, stakeholder management, ITIL4)
  • Tiered request ingestion from staff to management
  • Agile service management
  • Service desk

Five components in the transformation: ESC, learning, tiers, agile and service desk.
ServiceNow (ESC)
Why?
  • Reduce intake methods & context-switching
Intake methods:
  • Teams, email, Jira, phone, ESC
Context-switch for every step:
  • Monitor
  • Acknowledge
  • Solve
  • Update
  • Confirm
  • Resolve
Why ESC?
  • SSG client-facing, licensing, no manual steps

Dashboard showing the single source of truth
Learning
Why?
  • Practice what we preach
  • New skills required
How?
  • ~2.5 hours/week/person
  • Service desk
  • Weekly meetings
Hard skills
  • ServiceNow (ESC)
  • Jira
  • Incident management
  • IT project management
  • Documentation
  • Linux OS fundamentals
  • Windows OS fundamentals
  • Cloud fundamentals
Soft skills
  • Collaboration
  • Stakeholder communication
  • Kindness
  • Patience
  • Attention to detail
Tiers
Why?
  • Response delays
  • Overloaded managers
  • Teams “wait” for new work
  • Wasted staff resources
How?
  • ESC automation direct to team
  • Request to staff (tier two)
  • Escalation to managers (tier three)

Diagrams showing ESC automation direct to team.
Agile project management
Why?
  • Incident vs. project
  • Schedule project work
How?
  • “Agile development 2.0” scrum module in ServiceNow (ESC)
  • Cloud team pilot
  • Scrum meetings (daily, planning, review, etc.)
  • Project boards as “agendas”
  • Time bound for focus (sprints)

Combining incident management (ITIL) with agile project management
Service Desk
Why?
  • Incident vs. project
  • Incident or “unplanned work”
  • Improve responsiveness
How?
  • Reply templates
  • Service Desk manual
  • Dashboards
  • Teams channel “Service Desk”
Who
  • Two to three people
  • Cross-functional
When
  • Twice daily
  • One hour shifts
What
  • Check all intake methods
  • Acknowledge all humans
  • Create tickets
  • Self-assign
  • Escalate

Did we get there?

March – August 2023*

Created vs. resolved:
  • 18 per cent increase in average tickets resolved per week
  • Keeping up with demand
  • All work visible
Average time to resolution:
  • 30 per cent reduction in average time to resolution
  • Resolving requests more quickly
Intake & ingestion time:
  • By December, EIS-SSG recovered 77.5 hours of staff resources per week (93 per cent)
  • From 12 people, checking 11 intake methods, for 1.5 hours daily
  • To four people, checking one intake method, for 15 minutes daily
  • As of March 2024, EIS-SSG has recovered 83 hours of staff time daily

* Data from Jira (March – August 2023). Data from ServiceNow (September 2023 – March 2024) forthcoming.

Graphs showing improvement in the number of issues resolved and the the decrease in average time to resolution.
 

Diagram showing improvement in efficiency over time.

How did we get there?

ITIL4 guiding principles
Start where you are
  • Current state documentation over two-month period
Focus on value
  • Automation and process optimization for request intake and ingestion
Progress iteratively with feedback
  • One on ones (staff, managers, clients, partners)
  • Weekly meetings inviting feedback from staff and managers
  • System and Solutions Group client survey 2024 to gather feedback from clients and partners

SSG service cycle: request, intake, ingestion, solution and fulfillment.