by Daryl Yeo, Continual Service Improvement Manager

How many IT organisations do we know today who actually take active measures to perform continual service improvement?

At UXC Connect I have the privilege to be involved in shaping what that means to us as an IT service provider and more importantly what it means to our customers. I have learnt that continual service improvement must be more than a product, instead it must be the by-product of a genuine culture to see our customers succeed in their business objectives.

It is this core ingredient that differentiates us from other Continual Service Improvement programs on the market. This is the new CSI.

But what exactly is CSI? One of the earliest challenges I faced when building our practice was that almost everything could be classified as continual service improvement. I soon found myself knee deep in project work, transitioning in new services and designing new processes. In the end after a few months looking back it was hard to substantiate what tangible contribution our program had actually achieved.

Our core ingredient was sufficient in fuelling the effort for delivery but something else was missing. I would like to introduce you to the second ingredient: metrics.

In the simplest terms, where there is a business need, opportunity or problem our CSI methodology has evolved to understand, measure and improve. Our definition of what constitutes CSI is still defined by our customers’ needs but what we do now is to translate those needs into measureable metrics that we can use to substantiate improvement. The old saying stands true, “You can’t control what you can’t measure”.

Recently we have successfully completed three sustainable initiatives worth $200,000 in efficiency savings annually and at no cost to our customers. These projects ranged from reducing laptop fulfilment time from 33 business days to 5 working days and reducing the time Service Desk Agents spent on the phone by about 2000 minutes per month at no sacrifice of service quality to our customers.

Not all improvement projects we undertake have financial motives. For one of our customers a particular process was causing high inaccuracies (80% errors) with their user termination process. This caused them to consistently fail IT security audits. We spent time with them to understand their needs and made approved changes to existing processes which reduced the errors to less than 1%. They are now able to meet audit requirements and have reduced the associated IT risks to their organisation.

Another customer allowed their employees to transfer files through a corporate USB device. As a result of a technological gap there was the risk that confidential information was being stored on non-secure personal USB devices. Recognising the risk, we performed an evaluation on enterprise grade devices. We worked alongside their IT security team to ensure a fit for purpose corporate USB storage device that would meet their need to transfer information safely and securely.

These are just a few examples of what the new CSI looks like. I’m excited by the possibilities and it makes me wonder what does continual service improvement look like in your organisation?