Approach to improve effectiveness of Enterprise IT

Technology Consulting | IT Process Excellence

Approach to improve effectiveness of Enterprise IT Excerpts from the customer proposal, which describes the experience of several projects in Russia

Introduction

These days more and more companies change their focus from the goal of revenue growth (at any cost) to the goal of internal business efficiency and increase of net profit

The pressure upon IT Managers is growing, demanding continuous cut of IT costs, which could be a difficult management task

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Accenture approach

Accenture experience shows that our clients have already implemented all major IT process, which are already very efficient, leaving almost no space for an improvement. There is still a huge source of inefficiency laying on process boundaries, everywhere when individual processes overlap.

Respective activities require a substantial coordination efforts and a high involvement of IT Managers, who are already overloaded.

To solve these problems and free up IT Managers’ time Accenture offers a number of quick wins and solutions aimed to automate routine management tasks and to shift management focus from daily problems to the overall improvement of IT effectiveness

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Business Relationship

Development and

Transformation

Maintenance

IT Governance

IT Manager’s common objectives

•Performing planned operational tasks

•Fulfilling standard requests (e.g. grant of access to a system, or printers tonner replacement)

Minimise the spending on current operations

• Incidents resolution Minimise business loss

•Developing features that are really valuable for customers

Maximise cost-effectiveness of IT Development function

•Resolving repeatable problems

•System monitoring and preventive maintenance

Maximise incident prevention rate at minimal costs


We identify the following common objectives set for any IT Manager


Implementation approach

Control costs by type of activity

• The classification of tasks performed for individual business areas, systems and types of work

• Identification of most costly types of activity, business areas and systems

Control of other operating costs

• Registration and scheduling of the regular license payments

Managing initiatives to reduce operating costs

• Identification of initiatives providing maximum reduction of costs per a unit of invested capital

• The classification by means of existing ITSM system utilising the CMDB capabilities and data

• Integration of Time reporting and ITSM system for per-task accounting of efforts spent

• Using a specialised software for accounting and scheduling of software licensing fees

• Automatic generation of work orders for responsible engineers setting task to propose an improvement initiative in accordance with the approved KPI

• Implementation of initiatives as RFC, using the appropriate procedure for prioritizing

• Automatic calculation of the employee individual KPI showing the number of initiatives implemented in period

An example of the implementation in Accenture projects



Example of Implementation


• A comprehensive accounting of labor costs of IT professionals is supported by a separate Time reporting system which is integrated with the Helpdesk system, and Project Management System, which allows to reduce significantly the time to fill out the time reports.

This allows to consider the costs in relation to each request

Allows to accurately track the use of project budgets and the maintenance budget

Provides a detailed calculation of performance indicators down to the cost of a single incident

Minimise business loss


Prioritization of incidents and problems

• Identify incidents that have a profound impact on business, and their resolution in the shortest possible time

Control incidents resolution time

• Identify the constraints which are preventing a quick resolution critical incidents


• The implementation of the automatic determining of the business impact, according to the parameters of the incident specified by the user or a service desk engineer

• Defining the different target duration to address the incident with different levels of impact on business

• Automated analysis of the effectiveness of the process of incident handling. Analysis of PCE and WIP indicators. Automatic notification of managers by email and SMS in case of bottlenecks

• Automatic generation of work orders on the analysis of causes of significantly overdue incidents resolution


Minimise business loss


• The implementation of the automatic determination of business impact (based on simple query attributes, which are specified by the user or the service desk engineer at registration request) provides an objective system to build a queue of requests to avoid abuse by users and IT professionals, and establishes the foundation for a clear service level agreement with users (SLA)



Implementation approach (1/2)

Estimation and scheduling of tasks

• Prepare cost and time estimates for implementation: to make a decision about the appropriateness of the change and to set the target (control) indicators of costs, benefits and terms of implementation

Prioritisation of RFC and Projects

• Allocation of IT professionals on the implementation of the tasks that bring the maximum business benefits per unit of cost


• Automated methods for express estimation of benefits and costs

• Automation of process in which business users evaluate the business benefits and the IT system developers evaluate the costs

• End-to-end automated prioritization of all incoming requests for IT development – either projects or individual RFC, with the possibility for a business owner to justify manual adjustment the priority of requests

• Automatic preparation of a list of tasks, candidates for inclusion in the next release, iteration, or sprint




Control of spending

• Identify tasks that occupy more time than planned

Control the earned benefits

• Identify the constraints which do not allow to implement all of the planned benefits

Control implementation terms

• Identify tasks implemented for longer than it was planned, and consequently bringing less business benefits


• Time tracking in a centralized system proceeding from actual costs. The initial plan is used to prefill the time reports, followed by a mandatory adjustment by an employee

• Automatic daily reminder by email for unfilled or partially filled time reports, with the automatic escalation to a manager in case of a significant delay

• Specifying a subjective evaluation of benefits in automated protocols of UAT

• Automatic generation of work orders on the analysis of cases of significant non-compliance results to initial estimates

• Automatic notification about overspending of work efforts or late implementation of RFC

• The implementation of a mandatory renegotiation process for estimates and priority, applicable for all requests with a significant overspending or delay




• Business benefits calculator has been implemented to ensure uniformity of estimates and to assist inexperienced users to prepare their estimates. The estimation tool is designed as a step by step instruction explaining the rules for calculating benefits, and providing a set of simple calculators for the most typical categories of benefits




Preventive maintenance

• Ensuring IT staff is focused on prevention of problems and prevention of incidents (and as a consequence - at reducing of business losses)

• Identification of initiatives providing maximum reduction of business losses per a unit of invested capital

• Managing for the preventive maintenance work executed as planned operational activities from the standpoint of labor costs and the benefits achieved

• Automatic generation of work orders for responsible engineers setting task to propose an improvement initiative in accordance with the approved KPI

• Implementation of initiatives as RFC, using the appropriate procedure for prioritizing

• Automatic calculation of the employee individual KPI showing the number of initiatives implemented in period

• Accounting of preventive maintenance work as a separate service

• The periodic (every six months or a year) generation of orders for the analysis of labor costs for a particular type of preventive maintenance and evaluation of the benefits achieved






• Tools for regular analysis of the root causes helps to determine and to record the causes of high-priority incidents. Each of support engineers record the cause of an incident in the database, soon after closing the incident. In case when the cause is not determined in time an automatic reminder is sent by email

Common activities


• Centralized accounting of whole time spent by all IT professionals, split by type of work, and linking to specific requests


Separately, we highlight the following tasks that are required for all areas:

• Time tracking in a centralized system proceeding from actual costs. Timereports are automatically populated on the basis of all requests processed by an expert during a day, and also on the basis of project plans, followed by a mandatory adjustment by an employee

• Automatic daily reminder by email for unfilled or partially filled time reports, with the automatic escalation to a manager in case of a significant delay


Common activities

• Automatic email notification

• The implementation of a simple alert system for IT engineers and IT managers notifying about overdue tasks and other cases requiring attention

• Automatic generation and send out of reports required by the recipient of such reports

Common activities


• One unified queue for all of requests, workorders, RFCs, and other tasks, assigned to an IT employee

• End-to-end prioritization of all tasks, assigned to an IT employee


Separately, we highlight the following tasks that are required for all areas:

• The implementation of high performance unified task queue, that displays all the tasks the employee received in different systems with continuous prioritization and displaying of target dates, as well as the recommended time of commencement of work

• Displaying the queue of tasks assigned to a workgroup or department


Common activities

• Lightweight reporting system • Using a simple and highly efficient system for reporting, which does not require licensing fees, which allows to receive online data from operational systems, allows to create reports in Excel, and to include simple reports in the automatic e-mail alerts

Common activities



• The implementation of the unified task queue, that displays all the tasks the employee

received in different systems with continuous prioritization and displaying of target dates, as well as the recommended time of commencement of work allows not to miss a single task and to ensure compliance with target dates and SLA

The main techniques used

• Automatic scoring of user requests to select the highest priority

• Automatic scheduling of tasks according to their priorities

• Automated control of timing and labor costs, with automatic notification when the plan is exceeded

• Integrating data from various IT systems

• Focus on finding bottlenecks and major chronophages

• Visual communication of status, expectations and plans for all stakeholders – users, IT professionals, managers
