Service Management Transformation Programme

Sector:
News and Financial Information

Business Challenge:
The Global Operations department had under-invested for years and needed to build a solid platform as a basis for subsequent transformation following a challenge set by the CEO for the company to make deep change to their operating model.

The department is responsible for the IT service support and service delivery functions and is key to the support of over 250,000 paying customers worldwide. Service Management processes aligned to ITIL were not established and they did not have a service culture other than being highly reactive to service outages leading to much inefficiency and customer disappointment.

At the outset of the programme, the leadership team felt that the department was not ready for deep change therefore year 1 was spent providing stability and predictability to the operation through simple processes and a structured education programme. From there, the service management processes were designed (based on ITIL) and implemented across 1,000 IT staff worldwide. The final stage of the programme involved the selection of an off-the-shelf toolset to allow for automation of the processes thereby driving up process compliance and increasing efficiency.

How did we help?
The programme lasted for over 3 years and in that time Xceed was involved from inception through to the transition of the new functions into business-as-usual service management. Our team advised the client’s management team on what to do and how to do it; we designed the programme and staffed the various workstreams using third party expertise where necessary. We collected the requirements, developed the business case, managed the stakeholders, defined and delivered the communications and training plans, managed the third parties, the design of the service management organisation and the eventual transition to a business-as-usual state.

Objectives:

• Implement a service culture
• Bring a level of predictability and stability into an environment that was complex, diverse, geographically dispersed and hardened to change

The corporate objectives were to:

• Improve the overall customer experience (This filtered through to the IT Operations department as an urgent need to improve service)

Benefits Realisation:
In bringing order to relative chaos, the client realised benefits in terms of cost reduction and service improvement. Cost reductions were gained through the removal of duplicated effort and the streamlining of key processes. In addition, the introduction of proactive processes such as Problem Management reduced the number of repeat incidents and outage times and helped the organisation increase the number of incident free days, weeks and even months