Process Governance

[Benson112]

Hi All,

I am currently in a situation where by i have spent alot of time and effor updating our incident management process and i find out last week that our Service Desk dont even know where it is stored let alone follow it on a daily basis.

Basically i am looking at ways of ensuring they use the process but the only thing i can think of doing is spot checks on incidents to review their lifecycle and see if the process was followed.

Could any of you provide me with any other ways your organisations monitor this?

[Guerino1]

Hello Benson,

One way of handling this is to use proper tools that allow you to track and measure what they're doing, through the data they create and work with. Done correctly, your Incident Management tool can go a long way toward telling you if they're following process properly, or not.

My Best,

Frank Guerino, CEO
TraverseIT
On-Demand ITIL

[Benson112]

Thankyou for your answer Guerino1...

The thign is our tool is not fit for purpose and that is not likely to change in the forseable future so i was looking for idea on how other people do this, without the tool.

Sorry i should have specified this.

I have come up with a spreadsheet but it is alot of manual work. I dont mind doing this work as it goes a long way to depicting which parts of the process are and arent being followed but i would still like to hear how other people do this.

[WendyB]

I would say training, training and more training.

Without a tool that can help, you're in a very manual place. And checking up on people will be very difficult.
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v3 ITIL Expert
v2 ITIL Service Manager Certified

[joeblough]

How do you record incidents? Have you defined what constitutes as an "incident"? Do you have a separate group within SD that does Incident Management? or is it SD folks who wear both hats?

From what I see, there is a motivation factor missing. You really need to sell the idea of incident management to SD folks. If they don't see it as an advantage to their job, they will try to avoid it as much as possible. That is why its always a good idea to separate SD and Incident Management teams.

[m_croon]

Hi Benson,

So the quality of the tool is a 'given', at least for now. I'd suggest you start reporting anyway, on a weekly basis and no more than one sheet of paper. Even the worst tool should be able to provide you with simple indicators such as:
* # of incidents logged / solved
* # of open incidents per team
* Short specification of the 10 oldest unsolved incidents (with logging date)

If you are able to put this info on one sheet of paper and post it on a bulletin board at your service desk, another one at the back office and another one at the IT managers desk, you'll find that people will react to this, ranging from positive to agressive. Both are welcome reactions in my opinion (at least in the beginning). Make sure that management agrees that these reports are posted.

After this: use the short specification of the 10 oldest unsolved incidents in a short weekly meeting (max. 20 minutes) with a service desk guy and 1 or 2 backoffice people. Let them explain why these incidents are still open, and make the explicit "assumption" that as these incidents are the oldest ones, they are by definition open too long.

I held this meeting in the past at one of my clients' organisations, which resulted in a decrease of open incidents by approx. 60% (structurally) within 4 months.

When you have done this, you have not so much positioned your procedures as such, but have proven the contribution of incident (proces) management. After this, the mindsetting of the people you work with should be much more in favor of your procedures.

Hope this helps,

Michiel

[Guerino1]

Benson,

Another option is to ensure that you get leaders hooked on expecting to see and use the dashboards & reports you create (daily, bi-weekly, or weekly). The more they see them and rely on them, the more pressure will exist for those that need to properly create the data that is used for them, especially if you can "name" the people that are not providing the right data for the leader reading the information. You can go back and say "leader X wants to know why you're not tracking data properly. He/she is expecting this data, how do we ensure you're capturing it correctly?" Then it's important to work with them so that they understand that high quality data and process flow is "part of their job".

I hope this helps.

My Best,

Frank Guerino, CEO
TraverseIT
On-Demand ITIL