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An international manufacturing company had outsourced its IT services to an external supplier. The supplier planned to improve the Service Support processes by means of a detailed understanding of the current practices (including points of escalation and authorisation) and through development of the processes in line with recognised 'best practice' guidance.
Initial analysis indicated that there were approximately 20 Service Support subprocesses for dealing with service requests, change requests and the resolution of hardware and software problems. The initial state of these subprocesses, all of which had an element of interaction with the Customer, was documented by the supplier and his Customer using work flow diagrams (WFDs) and through brief functional descriptions. The WFD approach and existing terminology for roles, for types of requests and for calls had been used to aid Customer understanding.
The documentation of the Service Support subprocesses and the adoption of better working practices was initiated early in the contract. When both parties had agreed the baseline, a plan to consolidate the documentation into a more generic process set was created.
It was also intended that the supplier could better serve the international nature of its client's business through a central Service Desk, which it had established already for other international clients and which used an ITIL-compliant process for call capture and tracking to resolution. A joint management team was planning a project to transfer first-line support from the existing support structure to the Service Desk. It was imperative that this move would at least sustain, and perhaps improve, the perceived quality of Service Support.
The supplier was now faced with the difficulty of comparing and contrasting the description of practice within the central Service Desk with that represented in the WFDs of the current support structure. A suitable modelling approach had to be found which could provide the basis for consolidation of the existing documentation, support the move to the central Service Desk, and enable the process-improvement project to be implemented.
Although the existing diagrams of the target Service Desk appeared outwardly similar to the WFDs of the current support operations, the diagrams were difficult to compare because of the differences in terminology and notational semantics.
It was decided that both would be 'reverse-engineered' to recover the basic design elements and the underlying subprocess purpose, and to redocument them so that they would be directly comparable.
A simple process-modelling formalism was adopted that had been previously used to produce generic reference models for ITIL guidance (as this would later facilitate the longer-term process -improvement programme and recognition of better practice).
The formalism consists of four basic constructs as shown in Figure B.3. The notation facilitates the diagrammatic representation of the scope of a process from a particular perspective and enables the dynamics of the process to be shown in terms of the actions and interactions undertaken by the people who perform specific roles.
Figure B.3 - Process model notation
The existing support function was believed to consist of two subprocesses:
These were compared and contrasted with the two Service Desk subprocesses, namely:
The process-modelling exercise indicated that there were a number of explicit roles and logical datastores associated with the process that had not been expanded in the original WFDs, - for instance, the role of local service co-ordinators, and status changes to the configuration data. Furthermore, the exercise facilitated the review of the existing process, for example, in raising queries about the approval mechanism for requests and their assignment to various support areas.
The comparison identified improvements to be gained in the move from the local support structure to the central Service Desk as:
Similarly, the gap analysis of break/fix call resolution and request completion versus Customer support and escalation showed some significant potential process improvements, including;
Figure B.4 depicts the subprocess for Customer support and Service Desk escalation. It should be noted that the process is dependent upon a process support tool for the monitoring of Incident progress, and that contingency planning measures need also to be considered.
Figure B.4 - Customer support and Service Desk escalation
In studying the above model, a number of questions were raised concerning:
Once the Service Support functions had been modelled in the way shown in Figure B.3 and Figure B.4, it was also possible to compare them with a target generic ITIL goal model for the respective Service Support functions.
As a result of this comparison, a number of areas for improvement were identified in that part of the support function that remained within the Customer site, i.e. predominantly Change Management, Configuration Management, Problem Management and second-line support.
The process-modelling exercise was initiated using WFDs and functional descriptions. This methodology was initially more familiar and useful to the Customer groups involved than the more formalised generic process models either in use by the service supplier or available from the best- practice sources such as ITIL. The approach therefore enabled both parties to baseline the points of authorisation, escalation and the general workflow through the Service Support functions.
The consolidation and redocumentation of the Service Support processes bridged the gap between the company's localised processes and procedures and the generic target ones. It enabled the process improvement team and Service Desk deployment teams to address interface gaps between the centralised desk and the local support structure, and also to create a planned improvement path between the current process set and ITIL best practice.
The main areas for focus following the redocumentation and comparison were:
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