In my earlier columns I have been arguing that the current ITIL Service Desk model does not work. Now I’m trying to do something much harder, to describe a support model that works.

This continues from the previous story http://www.itsmportal.com/columns/incident-management-not-service-desk-p...

Mr. Mann was happily studying travel offers to warm beaches where he planned to spend a part of the coming bonus, when he saw the CEO stepping in his room with a stack of reports in his hands. The white hair and beard of the old CEO was an unusual sight in the office and Mr. Mann could not remember if the CEO had ever visited IT before.

- Could you invite your team for a quick meeting, the CEO said. Mr. Mann quickly gathered Chris, James and Rhett round their tiny conference table.

-I see that the Server Services have done well as the Network Services. And the Service Desk has handled 1265 incidents well within SLA targets so that you all have earned full bonuses, the CEO said.
-But I have these other reports on my desk too. Sales Department report that during the most important sales week of the year, their system was unavailable for a day and they had to register sales manually. Then Production Department reports that the manual orders were incomplete and that they caused many problems in production. Finally Finance reports that they had to recompense customers for incorrect deliveries and that the revenue dropped 90% from expected during that week.
- But we had only one short failure on Monday on that week, we got the report at 9:35 and by 9:55 systems were up and running, explained Mr. Mann.
-Do you know what happened after that short failure, the CEO asked. Looking around the table, the CEO could see that no one had any idea.
-Let me tell you. When the system failed, they did try to get it back on but as nothing helped, they called the Service Desk which instructed them to restart their PC’s and try again. They did that but it did not help. Then they were told to collect the sales information manually using the old paper forms until IT fixed the system. According to your report the system came back on at 9:55 but no one told the sales people that.
- I called them, said Chris.
-Yes, you called the Sales Director who had reported the problem; who was just stepping in a plane for a series of customer meetings and was not able to forward that information. He only wrote it on Yammer at 4 PM.
-But that is not our fault. I don’t know what we should do differently, we are following ITIL best practice to the dot, Mr. Mann said.
- I’m not so sure of that but it is not the point. We lost 10 % of revenue and 50 % of profits for this year. The Business blames IT. The Business units have decided to lay off some staff and they tell me that we should outsource our entire IT.

The IT staff paled. From record bonuses to being unemployed was not a pleasant change.

- But I decided not to fire you yet; instead I will give you the staff Business wanted to lay off. They are six experienced people who know exactly how their departments work. And in the future, I’m not interested in your SLA-reports or your itil, whatever that may be. What is more important is how many sales we make and how many products we ship and how much money we earn.
- But we cannot influence that James said.
- HO HO HO, dear James, we have just seen that you guys can prevent our company reaching those goals, the CEO said and left.

-Yammer, what’s that? asked Rhett.
-Social media, it’s a new fad, sales do it all the time, but we don’t support it, said Chris.

A week later Mr. Mann invited the guys back to his room.
-I have been talking with our new staff and was surprised how unpopular we are. We decided that they start working in support as their previous departments are calling them anyway directly all the time, he said.
-Direct numbers are not a good idea, said Rhett,
-I have an idea, James said. Now they noticed that he looked a bit disheveled, he had scratches on his cheeks and some hay in his hair.
- I had an incident with a fox and my four chicken and I realized that somebody should take care of the chickens while somebody takes care of the fox at the same time. I couldn’t decide what to do and it became a bit messy. I think we should have one process for the real failures and one process for the chic, sorry customers.
-And we should start using and supporting Yammer, Chris said

A week later, they had a new plan.
Rhett managed the service desk, which was now split in three teams, Sales, Production and Admin support. They handled orders, customer problems and feedback using their customer service process. Their goal was to see that the business was running as usual. They became very active in the corporate intranet and Yammer. All problems and solutions were published immediately.

James managed the Ops team which handled all failures with their failure management process. Their goal was to fix all failures before anybody noticed that anything had happened. Of course sometimes the customers noticed failures first and in those cases James’ and Rhett’s teams cooperated in controlling the situation. James’ team was also quite active in the customer service process as they handled a large part of the orders.

Chris started working on a completely new process, Things that Shouldn’t have Happened. Every week they sorted out all customer problems and failures and picked the top TiSHa’s, as they were called and Chris set up a team to figure out how they should prevent those things.

Mr. Mann negotiated a new set of SLA’s with the Business. Now they measured everything in business terms, in money, errors and time. Mr. Mann was successful in getting the Business to admit that all IT problems were not IT Departments fault, everybody made mistakes and sometimes IT saved a lot of money or time by fixing situations. IT could also save time by making improvements in the Business processes and prevent errors by adding some double checks.

The new model was a great success and they were first a bit disappointed as the CEO did not visit them again but their disappointment vanished on Christmas Eve when they all found on their desks a hand written Thank You note from the CEO, attached to a substantial bonus check.

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Yes, this was a fairy tale but as we say in Finland
Hyvää Joulua ja Onnellista Uutta Vuotta 2012

PS The characters are entirely fictional and the fictional characters in real life may disagree completely with this story.