Approach to improve effectiveness of Enterprise IT

Technology Consulting | IT Process Excellence

Approach to improve effectiveness
of Enterprise IT
Excerpts from the customer proposal, which describes the experience of
several projects in Russia

Introduction

These days more and more companies change their focus from the goal
of revenue growth (at any cost) to the goal of internal business
efficiency and increase of net profit

The pressure upon IT Managers is growing, demanding continuous cut
of IT costs, which could be a difficult management task

Copyright © 2012 Accenture. All rights reserved. 2

Accenture approach

Accenture experience shows that our clients have
already implemented all major IT process, which
are already very efficient, leaving almost no space
for an improvement. There is still a huge source of
Maintenance
inefficiency laying on process boundaries,
everywhere when individual processes overlap.
Respective activities require a substantial
coordination efforts and a high involvement of Business
IT Governance
Relationship
IT Managers, who are already overloaded.
To solve these problems and free up IT Managers’
time Accenture offers a number of quick wins and
Development
solutions aimed to automate routine management and
tasks and to shift management focus from daily Transformation
problems to the overall improvement of IT
effectiveness


IT Manager’s common objectives

We identify the following common objectives set for any IT Manager

Minimise the spending • Performing planned operational tasks
• Fulfilling standard requests (e.g. grant of access to a
on current operations system, or printers tonner replacement)

Minimise business loss • Incidents resolution

Maximise cost-effectiveness • Developing features that are really valuable for
of IT Development function customers

Maximise incident prevention • Resolving repeatable problems
rate at minimal costs • System monitoring and preventive maintenance


Minimise the spending on current operations
Implementation approach

An example of the implementation
Control costs by type of activity in Accenture projects
• The classification of tasks performed for individual business areas, • The classification by means of existing ITSM system
systems and types of work utilising the CMDB capabilities and data

• Identification of most costly types of activity, business areas and • Integration of Time reporting and ITSM system for per-
systems task accounting of efforts spent

Control of other operating costs

• Registration and scheduling of the regular license payments • Using a specialised software for accounting and
scheduling of software licensing fees

Managing initiatives to reduce operating costs

• Identification of initiatives providing maximum reduction of costs per a • Automatic generation of work orders for responsible
unit of invested capital engineers setting task to propose an improvement
initiative in accordance with the approved KPI
• Implementation of initiatives as RFC, using the
appropriate procedure for prioritizing
• Automatic calculation of the employee individual KPI
showing the number of initiatives implemented in
period


Minimise the spending on current operations
Example of Implementation

• A comprehensive accounting of labor
costs of IT professionals
is supported by a separate Time reporting system
which is integrated with the Helpdesk system, and
Project Management System, which allows to reduce
significantly the time to fill out the time reports.

 This allows to consider the costs in relation to each
request
 Allows to accurately track the use of project budgets
and the maintenance budget
 Provides a detailed calculation of performance
indicators down to the cost of a single incident


Minimise business loss

Prioritization of incidents and problems
in Accenture projects

• Identify incidents that have a profound impact on business, and their • The implementation of the automatic determining of
resolution in the shortest possible time the business impact, according to the parameters of
the incident specified by the user or a service desk
engineer

• Defining the different target duration to address the
incident with different levels of impact on business

Control incidents resolution time

• Identify the constraints which are preventing a quick resolution critical • Automated analysis of the effectiveness of the process
incidents of incident handling. Analysis of PCE and WIP
indicators. Automatic notification of managers by
email and SMS in case of bottlenecks

• Automatic generation of work orders on the analysis
of causes of significantly overdue incidents resolution


Minimise business loss

• The implementation of the automatic determination of business impact
(based on simple query attributes, which are specified by the user or the service desk engineer at registration request)
provides an objective system to build a queue of requests to avoid abuse by users and IT professionals,
and establishes the foundation for a clear service level agreement with users (SLA)


Maximise cost-effectiveness of IT Development function
Implementation approach (1/2)

Estimation and scheduling of tasks
• Prepare cost and time estimates for implementation: to make a decision • Automated methods for express estimation of benefits
about the appropriateness of the change and to set the target (control) and costs
indicators of costs, benefits and terms of implementation • Automation of process in which business users evaluate
the business benefits and the IT system developers
evaluate the costs

Prioritisation of RFC and Projects

• Allocation of IT professionals on the implementation of the tasks that • End-to-end automated prioritization of all incoming
bring the maximum business benefits per unit of cost requests for IT development – either projects or
individual RFC, with the possibility for a business owner
to justify manual adjustment the priority of requests
• Automatic preparation of a list of tasks, candidates for
inclusion in the next release, iteration, or sprint



Control of spending
• Time tracking in a centralized system proceeding from
• Identify tasks that occupy more time than planned
actual costs. The initial plan is used to prefill the time
reports, followed by a mandatory adjustment by an
employee
• Automatic daily reminder by email for unfilled or
partially filled time reports, with the automatic
escalation to a manager in case of a significant delay

Control the earned benefits
• Identify the constraints which do not allow to implement all of the • Specifying a subjective evaluation of benefits in
planned benefits automated protocols of UAT
• Automatic generation of work orders on the analysis of
cases of significant non-compliance results to initial
estimates
Control implementation terms
• Identify tasks implemented for longer than it was planned, and • Automatic notification about overspending of work
consequently bringing less business benefits efforts or late implementation of RFC
• The implementation of a mandatory renegotiation
process for estimates and priority, applicable for all
requests with a significant overspending or delay



• Business benefits calculator
has been implemented to ensure uniformity of estimates and to assist inexperienced users to prepare
their estimates. The estimation tool is designed as a step by step instruction explaining the rules for
calculating benefits, and providing a set of simple calculators for the most typical categories of benefits


Maximise incident prevention rate at minimal costs

Preventive maintenance
• Ensuring IT staff is focused on prevention of problems and prevention of • Automatic generation of work orders for responsible
incidents (and as a consequence - at reducing of business losses) engineers setting task to propose an improvement
initiative in accordance with the approved KPI
• Identification of initiatives providing maximum reduction of business • Implementation of initiatives as RFC, using the
losses per a unit of invested capital appropriate procedure for prioritizing
• Automatic calculation of the employee individual KPI
• Managing for the preventive maintenance work executed as planned showing the number of initiatives implemented in
operational activities from the standpoint of labor costs and the period
benefits achieved
• Accounting of preventive maintenance work as a
separate service
• The periodic (every six months or a year) generation of
orders for the analysis of labor costs for a particular
type of preventive maintenance and evaluation of the
benefits achieved


Maximise incident prevention rate at minimal costs

• Tools for regular analysis of the root causes
helps to determine and to record the causes of high-
priority incidents. Each of support engineers record
the cause of an incident in the database, soon after
closing the incident. In case when the cause is not
determined in time an automatic reminder is sent by
email


Common activities

Separately, we highlight the following tasks that are required for all areas:
Common activities
• Centralized accounting of whole time spent by all IT • Time tracking in a centralized system proceeding from
actual costs. Timereports are automatically populated
professionals, split by type of work, and linking to on the basis of all requests processed by an expert
specific requests during a day, and also on the basis of project plans,
followed by a mandatory adjustment by an employee
• Automatic daily reminder by email for unfilled or
partially filled time reports, with the automatic
escalation to a manager in case of a significant delay

• Automatic email notification • The implementation of a simple alert system for IT
engineers and IT managers notifying about overdue
tasks and other cases requiring attention
• Automatic generation and send out of reports
required by the recipient of such reports


Common activities

Separately, we highlight the following tasks that are required for all areas:
Common activities
• One unified queue for all of requests, workorders, • The implementation of high performance unified task
queue, that displays all the tasks the employee
RFCs, and other tasks, assigned to an IT employee received in different systems with continuous
prioritization and displaying of target dates, as well as
the recommended time of commencement of work
• End-to-end prioritization of all tasks, assigned to an • Displaying the queue of tasks assigned to a workgroup
IT employee or department

• Lightweight reporting system • Using a simple and highly efficient system for reporting,
which does not require licensing fees, which allows to
receive online data from operational systems, allows to
create reports in Excel, and to include simple reports in
the automatic e-mail alerts


Common activities

• The implementation of the unified task
queue, that displays all the tasks the employee
received in different systems with continuous
prioritization and displaying of target dates, as well
as the recommended time of commencement of
work allows not to miss a single task and to ensure
compliance with target dates and SLA


The main techniques used

• Automatic scoring of user requests to select the highest priority

• Automatic scheduling of tasks according to their priorities

• Automated control of timing and labor costs, with automatic notification when the
plan is exceeded

• Integrating data from various IT systems

• Focus on finding bottlenecks and major chronophages

• Visual communication of status, expectations and plans for all stakeholders –
users, IT professionals, managers


Approach to improve effectiveness of Enterprise IT

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