“Benefiting from a Quality

Problem Management

Program”

“Benefiting from a Quality

Problem Management

Program”

Eliminating recurring problems from impacting the organization, employee productivity and

increasing the total cost of support.

Peter McGarahan

President / Founder

McGarahan & Associates

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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Pay It Forward

33

“PLAN THE WORK & WORK THE PLAN

44

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.

Problem Management – Break the Cycle!

App.Dev.

DBAsNetwork Techs.

ITAP Desktop Support

Service Desk

Know Call Types.

Right Work, Right People & Right Reasons.

Provide Resolutions Close to Customer.

Reduce Customer Contacts.

Make Knowledge Work.

Speed to Resolution.

6

Design customer-centric

services that improve service

delivery (service level

management), enhancing the

customer experience through

organizational flexibility, tool

integration, process efficiency &

people effectiveness.

Service Strategy & Design - A Fresh Start

Deliver service excellence

Develop business aligned goals & objectives

Create a service strategy

7

Mean time to resolution

Cost

Technologist/DevelopersTechnologist/Developers

Categorize CallTypes in Level they are Resolved in

Categorize CallTypes in Level they are Resolved in

Escalated callEscalated call

Call EliminationCall Elimination

Automated self-serviceAutomated self-service

First contactresolutionFirst contactresolution

Cost s

avings, SLA & Cust.

Sat improvements

Cost s

avings, SLA & Cust.

Sat improvements

Level-3Self-service Level-2Level-1

Bring visibility to repetitive, costly issues, questions and requests

$100 +$100 +

$50-$75$50-$75

$18-$23$18-$23

$5-$10$5-$10

Characteristics: Business-focused, Virtual, On-demand, Cost-effective, Responsive, Predictable, Consistent and Adaptive

Exiting Customers

Employees

Partners

New Customers

1-800.HELPM

Ew

ww

.HELPM

E.COM

HELP@

YOU

RCOM

PANY.CO

M

Cust

omer

Sup

port

Cen

ter

Level-2Specialist

IS OPS Services

Level-2Specialist

Network & Technical Services

Level-2Specialist

QA/Security

Level-2SpecialistWeb/DB/

Level-3Vendor Support

Applications

Level-2Specialist

CRM / Architecture

Level-2Specialist

Business SystemServices

Level-2Specialist

Bus. Analysis & Process Services

Level-2Specialist

Business Portal Services Level-3

Vendor SupportInfrastructure

Level-3Vendor Support

Programs

SLAOLA

UC

Reduce / EliminateDispatch

Reduce Escalations

Increase First ContactRes (FCR)

Call Elimination / Self-service

The “Shift Left” Structure

• 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

Know Your Cost

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.

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.

What To Do, Simply!

INC

LO

GIT

T

ec

hs

Pr o

b

Ow

ne

rR

CF

A a

dm

in.

IT M

gm

t.

NWF (Not Worth Fixing)

Y

N

Change Mgmt.

Incident Mgmt.

Approved (and funded)

Domain mgr. rates candidate

RCFA bus impact and

cost to fix as "large, med. and small"

Assign reactive

RCFAs at daily ops. meeting

ConsolidateRCFAspreparemetrics

Create parent record incident history

Create template

RCFAs forcandidates

with high incident rates

Assembles team(weekly RCFA update req'd)

Establishbus

impact

Post work- around (if

applicable)

Root causedetermination

Define fix

Submitchange

Executechange

Verifychange

successful

End

Close incident or route

Problem EliminationBoard (PEB)

1. Review metrics2. Select candidate RCFAs and assign

to prob. owner3. Investigate errant

RCFAs or domains4. Ensure resource bandwidth is utilized

Incidentrecords

Start

Submit intuitive RCFAs

Agent may submit intuitive RCFA

Newincident

DomainMgr.

Link incidentto RCFA

Enact work-around

(if posted)

Match to open RCFA

Root Cause Analysis

Reduce Downtime• Escalation

• Customer communication

• Documentation of workaround

Call Avoidance• Root cause analysis

• Trend analysis

• Problem review board

Who in the IT organization is responsible for critical problem

processes and resolution?

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

IT S

ervi

ce

Des

k

IT O

pera

tions

Proc

ess

Team Oth

er

Res

pons

ibilit

y no

t for

mal

ized

2008

2009

1414

Purposeful Problem Management

1. Develop guidelines for escalating a problem.

2. Ensure someone is in charge.

3. Create a problem management team with stakeholders from the service desk, operations, app. dev. and business.

4. Schedule regular meetings with team to review outstanding problems.

5. Develop a plan for calling emergency meetings.

6. Designate a "war room" or audio bridge.

7. Coordinate who will contact the customer with status, and how often.

8. Develop a severity coding system.

9. Keep an updated "on-call" list.

10.Hold a postmortem.

Develop A Response!

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?

Take Action!

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• 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.

Categorization / Taxonomy

• 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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80% of Call Volume / 20% Call Types

• 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.

A Matter of Perspective!

• 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

Targeting Call Types

• 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 theysee patterns (focus / debriefs).

• Communicate to employees well-known issues and fixes (self-service).

• Develop strong processes (change and release management).

Call Avoidance (Deflection / Elimination)

• Develop measurements for every component of SLA.

• You can't improve what you can't measure.

• Use historical measurements to observe trends.

• Communicate SLA metrics and measurements to business.

SLA = MTTR in 8 hours or less for 90% of requests

Resolutions that met SLA

Resolutions that didn’t meet SLA

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

95%

98.5%

70%

Focus on What Matters!

Time to Repair

# o

f P

rob

lem

s Focus onOutliers

?1

WHY?

Fact with…

Analysis, Action

2323

Actionable Reporting

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)

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.

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.

In Summary!

"Being a Service Leader is about positively

impacting the world around you! It’s not

about you, it's about all that you can do to make other people successful.“

Thank You!Pete McGarahan

McGarahan & Associatespete@mcgarahan.com

714.694.1158

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