Using Six Sigma to Drive Tangible Service Desk Improvement and Savings

Powerful and Practical Tools
for Service Desk Quality
Improvements and C t
I t d Cost
Savings

Kirk Holmes
President, Holmes and Associates, Inc.
kirk@holmesinc.net
http://www.holmesinc.net

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p g
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© ITSM Academy 2
Welcome!

Objectives and Agenda of
this Presentation

Objective: Keep it Real !!
Obj i K i R l
• Explain usage of tools like Lean Six Sigma
• Provide tips, guidance simple, tangible take-away’s
• Give glimpse of other useful tools and frameworks
• Get
G t you moving t
i towards t
d tangible i
ibl improvement t
Agenda
• LSS overview
• Case Study background
• C
Case study results
t d lt

© Holmes and Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved

About Kirk Holmes
• 30 year management, technology, & strategy consultant
y g , gy, gy
• Appointed as 2011 Examiner for Malcolm Baldrige National
Quality Award
• First General Manager for Broadband Internet within Comcast
• Founding Advisory Board member for Enterprise SPICE
(part of ISO 15504)
• Education: MIT B.S. Electrical Engineering; Stanford MBA

• Member, itSMF USA Board of Directors Jan 2007 – Dec 2010
• Portfolios included Publications, Bus Dev, Treasurer, Knowledge Management
(responsible for USA launch of ITIL® Version 3)
National Capital • One of original 23 founding members in 2003
p
Area LIG • LIG President from 2006 – 2009 (grew to largest LIG in world)


About Holmes and
Associates, Inc.
Associates Inc
• E
Executive advisory and operational consulting
ti d i d ti l lti
• IT Service Management Excellence
• Operational performance improvement
• Business Transformation (culture, Organizational
Change Management, organizational design)
g g g g )
• Service Solutions

• Clients have included IRS, NIH, Army, Time
Warner, Comcast, State of Montana


What is Lean Six Sigma?

Lean Reduce
Waste Reduce Cost
And and Time
Complexity

Improve
Six Sigma Quality
Improve
Mean and
Count Reduce Meet
Variation Customer
Duration Needs

Some Popular Lean Six
Sigma Tools

Pareto Charts
Value Stream Mapping
Cause & Effect Diagrams
Frequency Plots (Histograms)
Scatter Pl t
S tt Plots
Control Charts (SPC)
Mistake Proofing
Four Step Rapid Setup Reduction
Process Flow Improvement


DMAIC Methodology
Overview

8

CASE STUDY: Large Service
Desk Facing Growth Pains
• Rising demand (calls)

Ca Volume
• Challenging abandonment
• Big seasonality

all
• Rising cost per call

THE BIGGEST CUSTOMER CONCERN:
Resolution of user issues sometimes takes as
long as 180 days or more


Initial Improvement Through
Assessments Helped
Baldrige National Quality Award
(Organizational Mat rit )
(Organi ational Maturity)
• Leadership
IT Infrastructure Library ® • Customer Satisfaction
regarding planned changes?
• People
nt Intent • Process
4 Is the business need for a Service Desk clearly identified N The need for Help Des
and understood? management team but
• Information and Analysis
between Gov't and Co
Gov t • Planning
not clear about combin

7 Has the purpose and benefits of the Service Desk been N Purpose and benefits o
disseminated within the organization?
8 Has an education and/or training program been conducted N While there is general
for customers and users in the use of the Service Desk and effort needed to educa
its benefits benefits
pability
11 Does the Service Desk provide the customer/user with N Does not follow-up on
i f ti i il bilit i id t b h dl h t t

Benchmarks
• Lower Cost/call
• Lower Average Handle Time
Help Desk Institute (HDI)
reference • Improved Service Levels
…but still no prevention of
sporadic high-MTTR tickets

Death by KPIs: Not All
Metrics are Actionable
• Management monitoring of streams of
data with no context
• Data ≠ Information (even with ITIL® KPIs)

DAILY INCOMING VOLUME
All Customer Interactions
AVERAGE HANDLE TIME
(Incidents and Service Requests)
HOURLY UTILIZATION
HOURLY ABANDONMENT RATES


Lingering Dissatisfaction
with Escalation

Exceptions are
E ti
easily overlooked
by Service Desk
b S i D k
until crises erupt
b
because d il
daily
metrics look good


ITIL® Guidance?
• Escalate from Tier 2 to Tier 3 when “the
the
incident will need deeper technical
knowledge or the second level group has not
second-level
been able to resolve the incident within
agreed target times ”
times…
• “Hierarchic escalation is also used … so that
senior managers are aware and can be
prepared and take any necessary action”
y y


Asking and Answering the
Right Questions
• If we are d i ITIL® d
doing ITIL®, does th t mean we are
that
doing well?
• When should OLAs and SLAs be revisited?
• How does this performance really compare with
the past?
• When is executive intervention needed?
• How can we get the tough Tier 3 escalations to
be quickly resolved (competing priorities)?


TIP: Start with Tie-In to
Balanced Scorecard (BSC)

Financial Customer
Business
Workforce
process
Financial Metrics MEET FINANCIAL AND GROWTH TARGETS
Current
Financial YTD
Measures Description How Measured Baseline Targets Nov Dec YTD Period
Goals Analysis
Analysis

Increase Cost per
Total monthly cost divided by <$3.50
Customer Cost Contact, Fees charged per contact $5.98 /contact $4.61 $4.90 $5.35
total number of contacts handled /contact
Efficiencies normalized

Increase Total monthly cost billed (total
Cost per User, $0.40/user $0.30/user/mo
Customer Cost Fees charged per user labor plus direct fees) divided $0.37 $0.36 $0.39
normalized /month nth
Efficiencies by Average number of Users


CASE STUDY: Define
Phase
Problem/Goal Statement Business Impact
p
Problem: Customers are Statement
experiencing delays in the
resolution of their issues that can
sometimes exceed 180 days from The project will improve the capability to
date of receipt manage all tickets escalated from Tier I
Scope: This project will address tasks to Tier III and back to the user through
within the Service Desk Ticket final resolution by reducing the ticket
process processing times by 95% for all
Goal: The goal of the project is to escalated tickets.
achieve a 90% reduction in the
number of improperly escalated It will also streamline the ticket
Service Desk incidents An
incidents. escalation process by ensuring all
additional goal is to ensure that affected parties can properly use the
the users are kept informed of ticketing system in order to expedite
their incident’s resolution progress incident review and resolution.
at least every 7 days and that
days,
escalated tickets are resolved
within 30 days.
© Holmes and Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved 16

LSS Rule: Listen to
Stakeholders

VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER
VOICE OF THE BUSINESS

KIRK’s RULE of THUMB:
If you never or rarely have formally asked customers
their satisfaction, you are doing poorly in the eyes of the
customer


Case Study Process
Workshop

Process Step: (Tier 2) Check for existing
• Map the Flow of Process Steps
p p Unknown Errors and Problems
• Map the Flow of Information Trigger: Assigned Ticket
• Add Data Boxes and Starbursts Done: Record Saved
• Identify Value Added (VA) vs. Non Value
Added (NVA) steps TCT (Total Cycle Time): 5 Min
People: 1
Changeover Time:
g N/A
% First Time Yield:

Top Issues

Engage the Team 1. Insufficient incident data - Record not complete


Measure Phase – Measure
the Right Thing
Value Stream Map Baseline Data Collected

Do like Ritz Carlton
D it lik a Rit C lt CEO


Analyze Phase – Using All
the Big Brains
CVA/NVA/NVA-R Analysis Critical X/Root Cause Analysis

Critical X/Root Causes Analysis Prioritized Root Causes / Effects

Pareto
Chart


Improve Phase – Making it
Happen
Key Improvements “To-Be” Process Map

• Accelerated Sr. Management review
of potentially overdue tickets
(Hierarchical) Reengineering after
• Accelerated Tier 2 Review of unedited
Tier 3 tickets (Functional) doing Deep Dive into
• Modification of ticketing system Escalation steps and handoffs
queues to prevent stagnation
• Streamlined escalation and de-
escalation (reduced waste of NVA
hierarchical steps)
• Dedicated Tier 2 ticket processing
roles
• Re-Training for Tier 1,2,3 personnel
g , , p
• Operational Level Agreements
between Tiers
• New reporting using Control Charts
• Sampling of escalations used to track
proper/improper handling %
• New KPIs focusing on escalation


Control Phase –
Consolidating the Victory

• Transition t process owner
T iti to
• SOPs
• Training
• Replication

Step Action/Task Responsible Accountable Consulted Informed
1 Nov 6 Full SOP update of new process flow Bob John Craig Alex
New report format – weekly, Craig,
2 Nov 12 monthly Fred John Sandy Mike


TIP: Learn Control Charts

Time to Resolve (TTR) for all
escalated tickets (sorted by
time-date
time date stamp)

• Mean value (shown as X) – drive
down towards 0
• Upper Control Limit (UCL) – drive down towards goal of 7 days
• Exceptional variations (the red dots that fall outside the control range)
• General trends in the variation, e.g., if everything starts creeping up


Results: Control Charts
PROVE Less Fire Fighting

BEFORE AFTER

Mean Time to Resolve
Variability
Extreme violations


Results: Proven Impacts
on the Business
5 Year Monthly Measure BEFORE AFTER
Projected
Mean Time To 15.1 days 4.6 days
Cos
Cost Resolution for
Avoidance ̴ escalated tickets *

$1 Million % escalated tickets 48% 72%
closed in less than 7
days

% of tickets properly 54% 75%
escalated

* Used 2-t Significance Test to prove
statistical significance of case study
improvements
p


Tip: Use Tool+Methodology

Af fool with a tool and a methodology
is less likely still a fool

I Chart of 2009-09-04 Weekly TTR _(Days)
50
1

40
1
1
1

dividual Value
30 1
1 1
1 1
1
1
20 11 1
1 1
1 1 1 11 1 1 1

Ind
1
1 1 1 11 1 1
1 1
1
1
UCL=12.03
10
_
X=5.31

0
LCL=-1.41

1 61 121 181 241 301 361 421 481 541 601
Observation


Key Concepts
• ITIL® alone is not sufficient
l i t ffi i t
• Data vs. information
• Voice of Customer & Voice of Business
• Alignment and harmony To Do List:
 Stop
• Cross-functional teams are critical blaming
• Tools can help if used correctly  Start
• Remember Hawthorne analyzing
• Methodology helps  Control the
things within
• Fact-Based decision-making (see Baldrige) your control
• Feel h D
F l the Data


Thank you

Contact details:
Kirk Holmes
http://www.holmesinc.net
kirk@holmesinc.net
kirk@holmesinc net
(301) 998-6108


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