Business’ Disappointment

At my client organization’s offices, while passing through, I overheard two ladies in the marketing team expressing their dissatisfaction with IT and the help desk in particular. I stopped and spoke with them a little bit about what was troubling them. What emerged was the usual lack of quality and support provided by IT for the applications that they use to perform their job functions.

What IT must always keep in the forefront of their minds is that they are ultimately servicing the business. If staff in business cannot access the applications that they require to perform their duties, then this will result in their incapability to bring in new business and increase sales volume. This, in turn, will lower the organization’s competitiveness and damage the brand image. Ultimately, this will result in lower profits and less resources available to all departments including IT.

I have always emphasized that IT is key in today’s times. Most other departments within the typical organization (Sales, Marketing, HR, Accounts etc.) are fairly mature. However, IT is relatively new in that processing information utilizing computers has only been going on for a few decades or so. Sales and marketing have, in their way, been occurring since the dawn of time. What this means is that, generally, IT has the greatest potential for improvement within the organization. A 10% improvement is usually quite easy to achieve in the IT department of most organizations, if not a much higher percentage. If an organization can improve their IT by that amount, it is obvious that they will surge ahead of the competition due to the efficiencies that will be inherent in this improvement to the entire organization. IT is, therefore, the most significant catalyst to an organization’s success nowadays.

It is easy for IT to pigeonhole itself inconstantly putting out fires and only focusing on meeting quarterly numbers. However, this is a short sighted strategy that will hinder the organization and ultimately hurt IT. Constant improvement is not a luxury but a necessity for all of us, especially IT.

Skills Management

With IT being more knowledge centric and requiring an ever greater array of skill sets to get things done, one of the major challenges facing organizations today is the effective management of skills.

Now the skills can be brought on board in a number of ways. There is the option of acquiring In-House talent a.k.a. Full Time Employees. One could get Contractors (which is essentially the same thing nowadays). Consultants could be brought in as well. And then we have the ever present outsourcing option as well.

It is in the regular evaluation, analysis and relevant action in the area of employee/supplier skill set that the effective management of the organizations skills can be successfully undertaken. The ITIL body of knowledge refers to this as Supplier Management and outlines a strategy of classifying suppliers (which can be said to include employees as well) into long and short term suppliers as well as strategic or commodity suppliers. There are, of course, many different techniques and tools to perform the task of managing the skills and suppliers of the organization and these are readily available online. The focus of this post is to emphasize the need for these techniques and the warning to avoid the trap of forever being in fire-fighting mode and not ever getting to perform this important task.

There are many aspects to IT management. Some tasks are considered “essential” such as the successful completion of a critical project. Other tasks such as Skills Management are generally fall into the “we’ll get to them if we can” category. While the completion of the critical project will keep the lights on for tomorrow, it is the other tasks that distinguish a ordinary organization form a world class one.

The Strategic Plan

The one thing most companies do not create or work out of is a strategic plan. Now I am not talking about a project plan that should be (and is also usually not properly) created for every project but a master strategic plan for the IT department of the organization. This plan should cover a lot of different issues and plan for the long term growth of the company.

The strategic plan should of course first and foremost define and build upon the relationship between the products and services that a company produces and the utilization of these by its customers. This, in the end is the life blood of any business endeavor whether it is IT or retail sales. Financial management, Demand management and just good old fashioned service strategy must be performed to achieve this.

Of course, technology must be involved to decide what should be researched and developed in the future in order for the organization to be more competitive. Constant technological improvement is the lifeblood of any technological organization or department. This is obvious.

Furthermore, supplier management should also be considered in a longer term role within the overall strategy. Possibly, certain suppliers should be handled as longer term partners while other suppliers have a less intimate relationship with the organization. By the same token, a plan for the staff should be thought of and monitored in order to reduce the dramatic changes brought on people’s lives with changes in their employment status.

In reality all aspects of the organization must be considered at the high level and incorporated in a strategic plan. Individual project plans and so on should be deeper dives in to the overall strategic plan. It is the author’s hope that top management performs strategic planning in a well organized and complete way.

The Right Way to Reduce Cost

When organizations are faced with the task of reducing their cost, very often, they instinctively think of the removal of personnel. While this may be the correct course to take (especially in extreme market conditions such as the present), generally a great deal of cost savings can be obtained from the removal of waste.

IT waste is unique in that it generally cannot be inventoried and stored for later sale like steel pipes or copper wire. If a developer sat on the bench for a day then the company just wasted a man-day and the equivalent dollar amount and there is no way that this expenditure can be recovered. Therefore, a great deal of care and effort should be expended towards ensuring that waste does not occur in the first place. The second source of waste is needless rework due to defects and misalignment with business requirements. This is particularly true for organizations that perform application development. So another great way to streamline costs would be to ensure products and services are created right the first time which then minimizes the cost of performing testing and rework.

I am reminded of my time consulting at a large mortgage bank. The application being updated and released monthly always had issues in production after each monthly release. Multiple efforts of QA and user acceptance testing had to be performed, in spite of which defects would find their way to the end user. The following highlights my strategy as a consultant to resolve this situation:

• My first step was to create a system of metrics for measuring and analyzing defects so that we knew where we were and how changes were improving the performance or otherwise. After all if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.



• Next, I ensured worked with QA to re-strategize their approach and to create new test plans and test case documents. This ensured that the application was tested thoroughly and defects were at least found and not missed and sent on to the customer.



• At this stage, a great deal of pressure was taken of user acceptance testing and those personnel could be partially taken off testing and utilized elsewhere (which was a cost saving already). The defects found by QA were then analyzed for their root cause by development and this information was then utilized to ensure that the error did not occur again.



• The result of all this was that development began to produce software that was relatively defect free and the pressure on QA was significantly reduced while UA only performed a cursory check of software to be released. A number of personnel were freed up to work on other tasks and customers began to see zero defects in production.

Therefore, a great deal of cost savings was achieved along with improvement in quality and increased customer satisfaction. The alternative, which would reduce headcount and therefore cost, would still leave the organization with the issues and inefficiencies it had before but with fewer people to solve them with. Clearly, the former is the better way to go.

IT Risk to the Organization

As IT is a department within an organization with the goal of typically servicing other departments, there is a set of risks that IT poses to the organization. What I am talking about is different from the risks within an IT project execution or the day to day functioning of the IT department. I am focusing on the risks the IT department as a whole poses to the organization that it services.

The risks can be divided into the following main groups:

• Consequences of failure of services provided by IT


• Security risks


• Outsourcing and Partners failure risks


• Governmental and Legislative Risks

The IT head as well as senior management within the organization should consider these risks and work in tandem to manage them. This can be accomplished in the following ways:

• Create a risk management strategy and monitor and act on it regularly


• Engage outside auditors to analyze the risks from a new perspective


• Always be on the lookout to transfer risks


• And strengthen the quality of IT processes within the organization

In this way, organizations can get a proactive handle on the potential risks and manage them before they become a critical issue. It all really boils down to taking the effort and making it happen. There exist endless possible excuses to not do it, but in the end you have to consider that the competition is doing it so can you take the risk of not managing your risks?

The Design of Design

As the marketplace has transitioned from primarily products to mostly services, the need to design services has emerged as an important area of knowledge and specialization. The design of products has been well understood and established within IT now. The design of software utilizing object-oriented principles and methodologies is well known. The design of networks and firewalls is well understood and performed efficiently nowadays which was not the case, say, a decade ago. However, the design of services is still not approached with the level of understanding and maturity that other areas of IT have achieved.

This state of affairs is understandable as the concept of services within IT still elicits a great deal of confusion. To clarify, services differ from products in that while both satisfy customer’s needs, in the case of a service; the customer does not take ownership of the resources and risks associated with the providing of the service. Furthermore, the service generally consists of providing the customer with a complete experience as opposed the solitary experience of purchasing and utilizing product. Therefore, the design of a service involves certain special considerations that are listed below:

• Services must be designed to satisfy business objectives, based on the quality, compliance, risk and security requirements


• Services must be designed that can be easily and efficiently developed and enhanced within appropriate timescales and costs


• Identification and management of risks so that they can be removed or mitigated before services go live


• The design of secure and resilient IT infrastructures, environments, applications and data/information resources and capability that meet the current and future needs of the business and customers


• The design of measurement methods and metrics for assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of the design processes and their deliverables


• The production and maintenance of IT plans, processes, policies, architectures, frameworks and documents for the design of quality IT solutions, to meet current and future agreed business needs


• Contribute to the improvement of the overall quality of IT service within the imposed design constraints, especially by reducing the need for reworking and enhancing services once they have been implemented in the live environment

To accomplish these objectives, the design of services can be broken down in to the following aspects:

• Service solutions, including all of the functional requirements, resources and capabilities needed and agreed


• Service Management systems and tools, especially the Service Portfolio for the management and control of services through their lifecycle


• Technology architectures and management architectures and tools required to provide the services


• Processes needed to design, transition, operate and improve the services
  Measurement systems, methods and metrics for the services, the architectures and their constituent components and the processes

These areas of design can be performed by the implementation of Design processes like Availability Management, Capacity Management, Security Management etc. Further information regarding these can readily be obtained online by the interested reader.

Design must evolve from product design to service design as the paradigm shifts from products to services. Attempting to design services with a product design structure in place will result in poorly thought out services that do not satisfy the customer and result in defects and incidents in production. Clearly the changes required in today’s IT environment reach deep down in the organization’s structure and are not superficial by any means.

ISO Issues

A quick thanks to all who have commented and contributed to the blog site. To clarify some issues that have arisen, it is beyond the scope of this blog to provide detailed educational training. My vision with this is to get folks started off on a particular topic. Those who have expertise in the topic may not learn something new, but could (and should) contribute and add to what is presented by posting comments. On the other hand, those who are new to the topic can gain an introduction by reading the post and then further pursue the topic by obtaining the relevant study material if they are so inclined. With that stated, let’s move on to this week’s topic – ISO.

ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) has existed for a long time (Feb 23, 1947 to be exact) and caters to a lot of different industry domains and knowledge areas. Headquartered in Geneva, ISO is a non-governmental organization but is well known all over the world with significant influence and power. As its name implies, the organization is primarily concerned with the setting and maintenance of worldwide industrial and commercial standards. ISO provides guidelines for over 17,500 standards. While numerous standards exist that relate to technology, the standards most relevant to this blog site are the ISO 20000:2005 (IT Service Management) and the ISO 27000 (Information Security Management) standards.

As a consultant, I am passionately in favor of standards. One of the most frustrating things for me is to spend my time (and therefore the client’s money) in the attempt to understand the way things are setup and the terminology used at each organization that I consult at. What is fascinating is that each organization has its own “lingo” and way of defining items and resources. One might expect that their processes would differ but the very language they speak differs as well. This is not just inconvenient for a consultant or new employee but leads to confusion and problems/defects when interaction between other organizations is carried out. In today’s age of inter-dependency and outsourcing, it is important that all organizations speak the same language. Other benefits of implementing standards include compliance with governmental and regulatory requirements and the ability to enter global markets (some foreign countries require ISO certifications as a mandatory qualification to enter their market). Last but not least is the organizational efficiency and quality improvements inherent in improving the organization’s processes.

But for standards to work, they have to be implemented. So, how does one go about implementing an ISO standard? First, the decision must be taken and supported at the top management level and then accepted at the organizational level. I have observed too often the adaptation of some standard or methodology by the top brass while the cubicle level folks are dead-set against it. This almost always leads to the failure of the standard being employed. If not all at least a significant majority of the organization’s staff must be in favor of implementation of the standard.

Next, adequate resources must be planned for and set aside for the implementation of the standard. Training should be provide to key players in the implementation and outside consultants brought in as necessary.

If certification is desired, then an independent audit to assess and certify compliance to the standard’s requirements should be obtained.

ISO is a vast organization with a huge body of knowledge and my attempt to bring some of the IT aspects of it to light is a only but a first step in the right direction. Interested readers may pursue the subject in more detail via numerous resources available online.

Awareness

Welcome to the first posting of the IT Process Improvement blog. My goal in publishing this blog is to provide a site where we may share our experiences, learn what’s new, and network with like-minded folks. Experts, novices and everyone in between are welcome to participate and contribute with their perspectives, questions and comments. My posts will vary in technical depth and subject coverage depending on the topic of the post but I will attempt to compose the posts in a way that everyone benefits from the read. Feedback is welcome at viveks@comwick.com.

The title and central theme of this blog site is “IT Process Improvement”, but what do these words really mean? It would behoove us to fully comprehend and understand the significance and implications of this much used but much misunderstood phrase.

“IT” or “Information Technology” is defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) as “the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware”. But what do we mean by “information systems”? “Information systems” refer to a system of persons, tools, data records and activities that process data and information in an organization. Therefore, “IT” can be thought of as the use of computers and software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit and retrieve data within an organization.

“Process” as defined in the ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) body of knowledge is “a structured set of activities designed to accomplish a specific objective”. ITIL further explains that correctly defined processes are measurable, provide specific results, are customer-centric and are traceable to a specific trigger.

“Improvement” as defined by the dictionary is “a change or modification by which a more valuable or desirable condition is achieved”.

So now that we have clarity on each of the individual words, putting it together we may state that “IT Process Improvement” may be defined as “changes and modifications made to a structured set of activities that organizations utilize to manipulate their data utilizing computer software and hardware, that results in value being added to the activities” Or to put it more simply, the goal of IT process improvement is to add value to the organization and its customers by modifying the activities carried out by the organization to achieve its goals.

I had stated earlier that this is a much used but misunderstood phrase. It is much used because management in general and senior management in particular wants to “improve their processes” and be in a “state of continuous improvement”. Their attempts to implement the various process techniques and methodologies then create buzzwords that circulate around the water-coolers and cubicles of the organization. However, companies are rarely successful with their process improvement attempts and most of these well-meant undertakings peter out like poorly maintained jalopies. And this is where the “much misunderstood” statement comes in. Management must be clear right from the beginning about what their goals regarding process improvement are, what they plan to achieve and in what time period, what the costs and impacts to the business will be and the steps that they will take to achieve this. The staff of the organization should be educated on the process model to be followed and the benefits of implementation to the organization as well as to their own work lives emphasized. My experience with attempting to implement IT process improvements in the past has ALWAYS run into these two snags:

1. Unrealistic expectations of the process implementation and its benefits by Senior Management.



2. Resistance by the staff due to:


1. generic resistance to change (inertia, apathy, laziness) and



2. fear of a negative impact on their career and status in the organization if their work should actually be measured and metrics reported.

On the other hand, competition is intense. Perhaps more so in IT than in any other industry in the history of the world. Those that do not change and change fast, simply die. This has been more than validated in the current recession/depression ensuing worldwide. A point that is being made clear by the spate of bankruptcies and layoffs manifesting worldwide is that companies that did not position themselves to be extremely competitive are paying the price. Not staying competitive was never an option and IT process improvement which was generally considered a luxury by both IT and business decision makers has been proven to be a necessity. It was never a luxury in the past and never will be in the future, either. In reality it is an indispensible way that any organization can gain a significant advantage over its competitor in cost-control, superior product design and service delivery and customer satisfaction which obviously translates into increased sales and increased profits. Details of how IT process improvement creates a competitive edge will be addressed in future posts.

So the conundrum we have here is that a state of continuous improvement must be attained if an organization wishes to survive and yet achieving this state of “continuous improvement” requires more than just studying the process techniques or even attaining a certification or two. It takes AWARENESS. Awareness of the need to improve, awareness of the tools, techniques and methodologies out there. Awareness of the roadblocks that one will almost certainly encounter along the way. Awareness by the staff and employees that this is not a way for them to lose their jobs but a necessary part of everyday life to simply exist. And this awareness must exist at every level of the organization for the improvement initiative to be successful.

Hence my desire to publish this blog; I hope that in doing so, I will steadily, week by week, reach out to the IT community and increase the levels of awareness out there so that IT process improvement will be a much more accepted and successful undertaking carried out by organizations worldwide. Fortunately, forward thinking organizations such as SEI, ASQ, PMI, OGC, IFPUG etc. provide a rich source of knowledge and tools for use by IT professionals to stay competitive. Stay tuned for awareness of these techniques and more in future posts at the “IT Process Improvement” blog.