Importance of Optimized IT Service Delivery

How can you tell when your Service Delivery Operation is Optimized?  

Service Delivery Operations at your IT MSP are Optimized when:

  • Customer’s expectations are met 95% of the time

  • Resource Utilization is greater than 80%

  • Average Time to Incident Completion is under 12 hours 

  • Managed Service Agreement support is below 2 Techs per 1000 endpoints

That’s great info to know...but just what is the Roadmap from Current Operational inefficiencies to Optimization? 

That’s a loaded question and one that will take some time to unpack.

  • From our perspective the most important IT Service Delivery metrics are always:

    • Resource Utilization

    • SLA’s

    • Mean Time to Completion

    • RHEM

For a glimpse at how to leverage these 4 metrics, click here to download our IT Service Delivery Optimization Roadmap.

3 Phases for Benchmarking & Optimization

At the highest level, IT Service Delivery Optimization has these three distinct phases:

  1. Fundamentals of IT Service Delivery and PSA configurations

  2. Developing Advanced Service Delivery Systems and Workflows

  3. Advanced Reporting and Strategic Service Delivery Decision Making

If you’ve been following our blog over the past year, you know we’ve written extensively on the fundamentals of IT Service Delivery. 

Now we’re going to kick it up a notch as we take these Service Delivery topics to the next level. Our main focus will be on how to Develop Advanced Service Delivery Systems and Workflows. 

Starting now, we’re taking a stab at providing a step-by-step process to Develop and Implement these Advanced Service Delivery Systems and Workflows. 

You might notice that at times, the topics seem familiar because we’ve already covered them. But going forward, the perspective will be less about what they are and more on how to effectively integrate the fundamentals into a System or Workflow. 

Enjoy the ride and at any time, feel free to raise your hand and the conductor will explain what we are passing by at the moment! Now, let’s get rolling...

Revealing Service Delivery Improvement Changes

Here’s a quick, basic outline of the process for deploying these changes:

  1. Understand the purpose, goals, and reason for making the changes, and agree on the metrics that will be monitored, benchmarked, tracked, and validate that the pain of change was worthwhile.

  2. Clearly grasp what is changing in both PSA Configurations and Service Delivery workflows.

  3. Review the impact of the changes, so stakeholders can be identified and brought into the change conversations when appropriate.

  4. Analyze options and understand why the process change that was proposed is the best one.

  5. How to introduce the proposed change to the Support Team, how to collaborate with the Support Team, and how to communicate everything effectively so everyone is on board.

  6. Develop a specific implementation plan, including who will make the configuration changes and when.

  7. Execute, Communicate, and Monitor the implementation plan.

  8. Closeout the implementation, be sure to capture Lessons Learned. 

  9. Continue to track and report/validate the value of the “improvements.”

In the second phase of Service Delivery Optimization, “Developing Advanced Service Delivery Systems and Workflows,” there are seven steps to know about:

1. Technician and Service Coordinator Dashboards

  • Request Segmentation by Priority

  • Re-configuring SLAs by the new Priority schema

2. Triage SOP and Ticket workflow optimization

  • Re-configure/Re-purpose Queues

  • Automation and Customer Communication thru Work Flow Rules

3. Service Delivery thru Invoicing Optimization

  • Understanding what is in the Signed Agreements; including Services and Promises

  • Align Contracts, Contract Exclusions, Services, Roles and Work Types, PSA configurations

4. Sales to Sales/Engineering to Project Management workflows

  • Opportunity Pipeline Configurations, Stages, and Communications

  • Project Management’s five phases

5. IT Managed Service Support Optimization

  • Proactive Maintenance program

  • Root Cause Analysis and RMM Scripting

6. Service Manager Dashboard

  • Personnel Performance Coaching and Review 

  • IT Service Delivery Best in Class procedures

7. Reporting, Benchmarking, Monitoring, & Coaching

  • Resource Utilization

  • Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)

  • Reactive Hours per Endpoint per Month (RHEM)

Over the next months, we’ll explore each of these topics individually. And there are still two Introduction topics we haven’t covered yet:

  • The purpose of Optimization (hint: it is not just about the money)

  • Why request segmentation is crucial to Service Delivery, Managed Service Providers, and Operational Optimization Orientation (wish I could think of another O word)

As always, thank you for reading the many posts we’ve written. We’re looking forward to interacting with you as we move through this next series. 

Get started today on the path to optimized IT Service Delivery by subscribing and downloading our comprehensive IT Service Delivery Optimization Roadmap...”

UncategorizedAdvanced, Automation, IT MSP, optimization, phases, PSA, Resource Utilization, service deliveryComment