Proactive Problem Management Strategy
Problem management is often the most under used process, and is described by some as the
"If we only have the time" process. In reality it is a process that if used correctly adds real value to the business, and supports all of the other service management processes. To get there, there is a need to invest both time and resource – the very things that problem managers have little of.
Another issue is that problem management requires a combination of skills and approaches which are often lacking in many organisations. In addition, organisations get used to implementing permanent workarounds, ignoring the obvious benefits to both the business and ICT of investigating the source and eliminating the problem for good with a permanent change.
Is the cloud a "problem" for Problem Management – Dave D’Agostino – Service-Now.com Dave discusses the challenges and opportunities for IT Service Management with 'Cloud' computing.
Proactive Problem Managment Article, published in Service Talk, Spring 2012, by Steve White and Robert Kolaczynski.
Questions about Proactive Problem Managment Strategy?
Contact Us
This is second of four Problem Management presentations to be delivered to you by KT over the coming weeks. The next installment will be with you by 24th May.
Michael Blades
mblades@kepner-tregoe.com
+44 (0)1628 5878 75
Proactive Problem Management Strategy
Problem management is often the most under used process, and is described by some as the "If we only have the time" process. In reality it is a process that if used correctly adds real value to the business, and supports all of the other service management processes. To get there, there is a need to invest both time and resource – the very things that problem managers have little of.
Another issue is that problem management requires a combination of skills and approaches which are often lacking in many organisations. In addition, organisations get used to implementing permanent workarounds, ignoring the obvious benefits to both the business and ICT of investigating the source and eliminating the problem for good with a permanent change.
Are you communicating problems or having problems communicating? – John Griffiths, Fox IT John describes the communication issues present in the Servicedesk -> Incident Management -> Problem Management chain and provides some ideas for aligning the communication channels.
Proactive Problem Management Article, published in Service Talk, Spring 2012, written by Steve White and Robert Kolaczynski.
Questions about Proactive Problem Managment Strategy?
Contact Us
This is one of four Problem Management presentations to be delivered by KT over the coming 4 weeks. The next installment will be on the 17th May.
Michael Blades
mblades@kepner-tregoe.com
+44 (0)1628 5878 75
Satisfaction is fulfillment of a need or want; but loyalty is a state of unswerving allegiance. Loyal customers tend to forgive more and brag more. They are the Coca-Cola drinkers who cancel their drink order rather than swallow Pepsi, travelers who describe their first flight on Singapore Airlines with awe, photographers who love their old Nikons and their new ones, and diners who reserve the same table at their favorite restaurant. In their loyalty to a company, they aren’t swayed by competitors’ marketing campaigns; and they are quick to act as advocates.
While satisfied customers sustain revenues it is these loyal customers who promote growth, skyrocket your reputation, and propel you as a world-class organization. Building customer loyalty is a strategic, organizational decision that requires knowing all your customers and identifying who your best customers are and why they choose you.
As a service and support organization, there are actions that you can take to move beyond customer satisfaction and reap the rewards of customer loyalty.
Action #1: Define your focus and direction and use this vision to guide the customer service you provide. A clear vision drives behavior and is understood by all stakeholders—including customers—to the level of “what does it mean to me?”
Action #2: Identify the common characteristics of your customers. Understanding each group, especially your high-value customers, helps you target their unique needs within the marketplace.
Action #3: Build your scope of services around your customers’ needs. Designing specific services and identifying relevant resources to meet common needs for similar customers helps optimize resources while improving service.
Action #4. Strengthen competitive advantage by understanding your customers’ perspective. Identify what your customers see as your greatest advantage and the reason they return. Understanding how your customers see you in relation to your competitors, helps you define your strengths and weaknesses.
Action #5. Build capabilities to support your competitive advantage. Identify and fill organizational gaps (process, skills, equipment and facilities) to maximize competitive advantages and minimize disadvantages.
Action #6. Create a culture of trust and appreciation. Culture is a product of behaviors and attitudes that influence implementation of your vision. Leaders’ viewpoints and actions strongly affect culture. There is a high correlation between satisfied, loyal customers and satisfied, loyal employees.
7. Execute your vision flawlessly. To achieve your vision, identify and prioritize major initiatives. A key component of execution involves clearly identifying initiatives that are already underway, initiatives that will need to change in scope or direction, and new initiatives that will need to be planned.
Developing loyal—not merely satisfied—customers will take time and effort. It begins with a clear, customer-focused vision and is executed with full commitment from key stakeholders. Your organization will move beyond satisfying customers to building customer lifetime value that yields long-term growth and increased market share.
Read the full article...
Learn more about transforming the customer experience by visiting KT Service Value Management.
Shellina Damji is a senior consultant with Kepner-Tregoe, Inc. Her primary focus is on strategy formulation and implementation, the facilitation and delivery of critical thinking skills, and analysis of organizational processes.
Do you recall the last time you facilitated a group or small team of people?
On reflection, how do you think you did? How well do you think you controlled the group dynamics? What progress did you make during the session? Could it have gone better? Whether managing major incidents, making complex decisions or facilitating group meetings, strong leadership capabilities are called for. Frequently however, leaders often find themselves confronted with a number of challenges when working with teams. Leaders report that the top 5 barriers to successful facilitation are:
-
Too much "thinking within the box", few other paths are explored.
-
Too confident in using existing expert content knowledge whilst technology continues to become more complex.
-
Trusting solutions that worked before.
-
Decision making being done on poor quality information.
-
Actions are taken whilst there is a lack of common understanding of the issue.
Read more about the 5 barriers in the article written by Martine Joosten, Consultant at Kepner Tregoe
The Challenge:
A pharmaceutical company produced a compound using three ingredients. One of them, Substance A, had a tendency to stick to the grinding machine, causing shut-downs and costing money for maintenance and clean-up. The producer decided if they ground Substance A finer, they could prevent it from sticking to the machine. The change was within the process specifications, so they made it and their headaches then went away. Shortly afterward, across the street, at their sister facility that blends the three substances together, they opened the barrels of Substance A and found it caked solid--only removable with a hammer and chisel. The finer grind solved the problem of sticking, but led to a new problem—caking.
Solution-caused problems are expensive, disruptive, and much more common than may be suspected. When discovered and analyzed, they lead to embarrassment, some finger-pointing, and a lot of head-wagging. If we deconstruct them, we can see that they come in different types and each should be approached differently.
Types of Solution-Caused Problems
Containment-Caused Problems—Failing to find the root cause in the first place, and adopting an interim action instead of a permanent corrective one.
Problem - Relocation Problems—“Fixes” that cause problems downstream
Opportunity-Caused Problems—Changing of a variable, for what is considered a positive reason, without thinking about the affect on the final product.
Failure-to-Communicate Problems—Failing to communicate a change that could affect the process one or more steps down-stream
Failure-to-Understand-Change Problems--Introducing a change into a process, will potentially introduce variation. Changes cause problems, and change is change--it needs to be adequately analyzed and managed.
Avoiding Solution-Caused Problems
Solution-caused problems are surprisingly pervasive, but they can be avoided. There are three elements required to minimize the occurrence of solution-caused problems and, if a problem does occur, to reduce its impact without creating more problems.
1. An Analytical Approach – Asking the question, ‘What could go wrong?’ is a start, but solely asking the question, and even listing a few potential problems, will not by itself minimize the chance of something going wrong. Our experience tells us that you have to be quite detailed about the potential problems, specific enough to be able to hypothesize some likely causes for each potential problem.
2. A Change Management System That Builds in An Analytical Approach - In the heat of the moment, such as when trying to get a costly line back up and running again, people may skip steps in order to speed up the process. One of the first steps skipped is asking, “What might go wrong?” As a result, we find that building a Potential Problem Analysis step into the approach is required to channel behavior. It may sound cynical to say, but most people are not rational unless they have to be, and will tend to avoid painstaking analysis if they can.
3. A Learning Culture - Finally, to apply Potential Problem Analysis, the company must build a culture that accepts the fact that unanticipated problems will occur, and believes that it is better to consider them in advance than try to react to them after they occur.
One subtle cause of a non-learning culture is in the human performance systems that companies develop to reward employees. When it comes to problems and potential problems, there is a built-in structural asymmetry. It is easy to see if someone has solved a problem – all you have to do is look to see if the product or the processes associated with it are up to spec again. On the other hand, it is close to impossible to ascertain whether someone has successfully prevented a potential problem from occurring. The only aspect available to examine is the fact of non-occurrence, which can be explained by assuming there never was a potential problem in the first place, or that some other unplanned event prevented it from occurring. In short, you cannot prove that your preventive action minimized the probability of the problem occurring, or that your contingent action minimized the effects, thus leading companies to recognize employees who solve problems, but not those who prevent them.
Summary
Solution-caused problems are all too common and are an indication of an incomplete approach to resolving issues. Companies can quickly earn back multiples of the time and money they invest by installing the skills needed to attack problems, systems to track them, and a mind-set that values preventing them.
Download the complete white paper: Solution-Caused Problems and How to Prevent Them
Webcast: "Managing Your Root Cause Investigations"
To register to receive a recorded version of this webcast fill out Contact Us on the right side of the page and put the name of the webcast in the Message field.
What separates winners from losers is the ability to manage fast-paced change in the new millenium—to anticipate it, prepare organizations for it, and turn it into a competitive advantage. When that change involves your greatest asset—your people—change initiatives need to begin with people as the basic unit. Structures and processes are crucial, but they are not the drivers of change…people are.
Success depends not so much on natural resources, capital and physical labor but on the organization’s ability to tap its collective wisdom—the accumulated judgment, perceptions, experience, intuition and intelligence of all employees—as it pursues product and market opportunities and better ways of serving its customers. By harnessing this precious resource, organizational improvements are fully realized and built into the fabric of a company.
Six Lessons to Remember
1. Build a value-based culture. Common values, that are clearly articulated and specific, build trust and tie together processes and systems. Charts and numbers appeal to reason, but change requires a leap of faith built on trust and shared values.
2. Provide clear direction. Given a common set of values, where should the organization be headed? Strategy is a framework that guides the choices that determine the nature and direction of an organization. People are more inclined to change behavior when their leaders have a clear sense of direction and present their vision in a compelling way.
3. Establish a social contract. What does an organization owe its people—and what do they, in turn, owe to the organization? Healthy organizations enable employees to meet personal goals, and in doing so they achieve organizational goals. Establishing a baseline for relationships between employees and the organization can turn collective knowledge and experience into competitive advantage.
4. Design the right performance environment. People in an organization work within a performance environment. The systems, structures, and processes that are embedded in that environment help people respond effectively to changes. Any change effort must include a set of positive and negative consequences and must balance the varied dimensions of the performance environment.
5. Build the right infrastructure. An organization’s structure is a kind of skeleton that holds together its disparate parts. This infrastructure must be aligned with the strategy and it must be “people-friendly.” Prevailing wisdom suggests building the infrastructure first and then helping people adapt through change initiatives. But people adapt structures, systems, and processes to their needs, and needs change. Therefore the infrastructure must always be evolving. People are the measure of what the structures, systems, and processes should be.
6. Create a learning environment. A learning environment is where skills can be acquired, used, and continuously improved. While companies must provide the tools, equipment, and systems for employees to excel, the emphasis should be on developing critical thinking skills and using them. When people become more proficient problem solvers, decision makers, and planners, performance increases dramatically.
To learn more: Human Performance and Training or Contact Us
In my last blog I discussed why we need to start ‘Leading’ IT as a true business.
Just to recap: Looking at your IT function in that light will force you…
- to link cost to value delivered (which will help you defend your budgets and resources),
- to think about how to differentiate yourself at an IT level (which may help you from being outsourced),
- to look at how to monetize the IT services you provide (which will make the consumers of your IT services realize your value), and
- to look at efficiency and effectiveness in your operation (which will balance cost with quality orientation)
The key word here is ‘Value’.
So what is Customer-Lifetime-Value (CLV) and why does it matter?
First, a definition: CLV = the present value of future cash flows attributed to the customer relationship
Making CLV a strategic goal post is based on two core beliefs:
- It’s all about sustaining (internal or external) customer relationships – this implies we need to understand what the customer truly needs from IT
- These relationships need to translate into (financial) value for the business
Using CLV as focal point will help you better articulate the direct contribution of your IT/Service organization to the overall business and identify the value drivers in your organization (see CLV illustration by clicking on the link).
So, what drives CLV?
The ‘revenue side’ is typically more challenging because it requires articulating the value/quality we get from the investment (the cost side). The illustration may not directly represent your business, e.g. you may not run your IT business as a profit center/revenue generator, but that doesn’t free you from articulating the value you provide to your internal customers.
So whatever is most critical to your company, whether it’s (internal) customer satisfaction, uptime, or enablement to provider better services to your company’s customers (e.g. better order fulfillment), you need to find a way to link your IT organization’s contributions to these business goals and identify areas of improvement.
Christoph Goldenstern is a Global Vice President and Principal with Kepner-Tregoe. He has more than 15 years of strategic and operational consulting and management experience with focus on Customer Service, Technology and other B2B industries.
At Kepner-Tregoe we do a fair amount of problem solving facilitation. A client will call us up and say,"We've got this problem, and we've been working on it for months, and we still don't have a consensus on the cause. It's gotten so bad that you can’t even ask a question without getting into a political fight. Could you send someone who can take over the analysis and act as an unbiased analyst, with a cold clear eye?"
And, if the issue matches our process, we often say "Yes."
We also do a fair amount of diagnostic work to help clients assess how their problem-solving process is working, where it may be having trouble, and where it may need to be revised. In the course of doing this, we get to read a lot of investigation reports. I mean, a lot of investigation reports.
And we have noticed a short-cut to tell if they have the cause nailed. It’s frighteningly simple, actually. All you have to do is count the CAPAs.
If the report lists a dozen separate corrective and preventive actions, you can be pretty sure that they don’t know the cause, and are "throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks." If you look into the CAPAs, you can often see that they have two or three causes they are trying to cover, and not enough evidence to nail down which one it is. Some of these CAPAs may not actually be corrective or preventive actions. They may be data-gathering steps. They may be actions to determine the cause, not to make it go away. And some may be generic ‘nice to do’ actions which probably won’t hurt, but might not help. Some folks add these in to make it apparent that they are taking the issue seriously and investing significant time and effort in its pursuit. But in the end they’re clutter.
On the other hand, if they only have one or two CAPAs, they probably have the right cause, or at least have enough confidence to focus on one possibility. And if there are only one or two corrective actions, it is easy to track the logic back to the data: If this is the fix, how does it address that as the cause? And if that is the cause, how does it explain these as the symptoms? It’s a clear logic chain.
In between two CAPAs and twelve CAPAs, you need to dig into the data to see what is there. One trick we often recommend is to pull three sections from the report--the symptoms, the cause, and the CAPAs—and put them together on a single page to see if they line up. If you can’t figure out how the cause causes the symptoms, that’s a problem. If it’s not clear how the CAPAs make the cause stop causing the symptoms, that’s a problem.
Of course, when you get down to it, each problem and each investigation is unique; if it weren’t you would know the cause, because you have seen exactly these symptoms before. So in the final analysis you have to read and analyze each one on its own. But as a starting point, as a short-cut, just count your CAPAs.
Webcast: Managing Your Root Cause Investigations, April 26, 2012, 11:00 a.m. (EDT)
Many CIOs and senior IT managers still don’t feel they are getting the respect their colleagues at similar levels from other business functions are getting. That’s because IT is still largely viewed as a support function of the business, not as a key capability, but as a cost center!
What’s so bad about being a cost center? Nothing really… if your business isn’t too worried about profitability. Assuming it is, however, the problem with being a cost center is that you are mostly going to be valued by productivity of your people and assets without a clear link to value. Each year’s budget conversation will then focus on how to simply squeeze more out of IT. When every last dime has been squeezed out, we can finally outsource IT, because it’s not a critical capability, right?
So how can IT break with that perception? For starters, start leading IT like a true business… then manage it as a profit center.
I deliberately choose the word leading because there is a difference between managing and leading. Many people can manage as in “getting things done according to plan”. Leading, on the other hand, requires developing a vision, a value proposition and an element of differentiation. Then comes the hard part: motivating your subordinates and colleagues to participate in the realization of that vision.
First we have to internalize though that IT can be viewed as a “business within the business”. Why? It has all the attributes of a business:
- customers (perhaps internal, but still customers)
- services
- it produces quantifiable outputs
- it consumes resources
Looking at your IT function in that light will force you…
- to link cost to value delivered (which will help you defend your budgets and resources),
- to think about how to differentiate yourself at an IT level (which may help you from being outsourced),
- to look at how to monetize the IT services you provide (which will make the consumers of your IT services realize your value), and
- to look at efficiency and effectiveness in your operation (which will balance cost with quality orientation)
To quote a good colleague: ”It is then that IT Service Management will take its rightful place, shoulder-to-shoulder with Sales and Product Development as a direct contributor to profits, growth, and shareholder value”.*
Christoph Goldenstern is a Global Vice President and Principal with Kepner-Tregoe. He has more than 15 years of strategic and operational consulting and management experience with focus on Customer Service, Technology and other B2B industries.
*Source: “ITIL v4?” by Steve White, Kepner-Tregoe