Significance of Ops data while defining framework for Business Alignment

Many organizations, specially banks are trying to get transparency in the operations for the end-to-end process in order to find areas of improvement, improve efficiency and get control of the time lag during resolving exceptions. 

Essentially, the organizations are seeking to create visibility in the business process handled jointly by Business (Operations) and IT (applications).    

As a first step, it is significant to evaluate the current landscape (AS IS). It serves the following purpose: 

1. Provides inputs to analyze which processes are essential to monitor in detail in order to find areas of efficiency.
2. Provides us a strong data to substantiate our stand on re-engineering in order to reduce cycle time.
3. Gives us a focused & crucial point for mutual discussion and finding definite benefits areas

At high-level, here are the steps:

Step 1: Understand and capture entire business process from Operations. This includes process steps, rules, logic, exceptions, decision making areas, KPI, SLAs etc. 

Step 2: Get inputs from Support Operations (RTB process) in terms of application data flow, incidents, outages, processing time, scheduling details etc for the business process.

Step 3: Get data from Development (CTB teams) in terms of interfaces, rules, exceptions etc coded in the application. 

Step 4: Map these together to understand the end-to-end business flow and the underlying platform.

The data gathering and mapping will provide inputs to such specific transformational initiatives that define frameworks for creating Visibility of the end-to-end process, understand the business impact of the issues etc. By and large, gathering data from operations is vital to initiate Business Alignment. 

Human touch – why is this important in Managed Service Production support model?

It does not matter what level you are at in an engagement – a director, manager or a team lead? Are you are expected to be a leader in your area of operation? Are you significantly changing the lives of the people who are working with you along with the required day-to-day operations? If you are getting the work done, you are a manager but if you are able to motivate the team and make them understand the significance of what they are doing which motivates them to complete the work, then you are a leader.

On many occasions, we miss the larger forest and run for the trees; we miss the responsibility of building people and focus on getting the work done. Managed Services is all about bringing in more efficiency and productivity at a lower cost. Improvement in margin pressure and the need for keeping the project in ‘Green’, makes us slog to focus on getting the work done. During the process, there is reduced focus on building the capability of a person. As a result, attrition is high, people are demotivated, stress is high due to constant pressure and lack of work-life balance.

So what’s missing today as compared to older days of Production support projects?

I believe human touch is the core element that is missing, which plays a key role in developing that relationship and making that difference in the lives of your people.

Here are three causes of reduced bonding and good relationship with your team members, which could otherwise add significant value to your projects:

·         Lack of appreciation or timely recognition of the efforts of your team members

As per one survey, 46% of people switch jobs due to lack of appreciation. There are limited areas of showing achievement and fewer opportunities to appreciate your team in Support engagements. Production support by nature is monotonous job and hence timely and honest credits and appreciation for any achievement and excellence, is the key to the satisfaction. It was easier and more visible earlier in smaller engagements.    

 

·         Lack of education on significance of the job and future career prospects to the team

With a mandate to improve the utilization rates, the margins and the need to do more for less, has taken the sheen away from the Production Support jobs. It is getting difficult for the members to be a specialist in a particular technology combined with a particular domain. Yet, stickiness to domain along with your experience in the required technology will be the most sought after skill in future. This education to the team members and the appropriate motivation to the team members to learn and absorb this knowledge is missing. Today, more focus is given on taking additional responsibilities on resource management. More emphasis is given by the manager on completing the job faster using mechanical tools and processes, which has taken precedence over developing the resource on business front.       

·         Huge IT campuses as compared to smaller offices found in older days

Small but significant contribution in loosing that personal human touch with the team members is attributed to large IT campuses as compared to smaller offices. Obviously, the smaller space lacks the cost benefits the large campus brings but it will take a major toll on an employee satisfaction. New faces in more numbers, lower intention to develop that connect due to other options, limitations in forming that social circle easily or keeping it intact for longer term etc. Though, not directly but working in large campuses will take its toll on the significance of keeping the human connect, which otherwise plays a major role during execution.

The bottom-line is that an increasing number of engagements are executed mechanically and as commodities. There is increased HR participation to influence the employees but that is external and does not create that impact which an internal connect could have possibly created. It is more important to look at your team as members of the extended family than ‘resources’ working on completing the SLA driven tasks. The stickiness to the project will remain absent until that human touch is felt and believed by your team members.  

 

Targeting Integrated Services as a service offering - an obvious progression in Managed Services

In new Operating models, there’s an enhanced focus on ‘Integrated Services’. Providing Integrated services is extremely challenging for any vendor. It requires bringing technology, operations and Infrastructure together to provide entire suite of services to the serviced organization on their business landscape.  

 

A large service provider can bring in different lines of service offerings and provide these services to the customer. In fact penetration in other areas of the business is an obvious move for any vendor who is already present in the customer landscape.

 

Usually the IT Service providers are too siloed within their organization itself. The verticals and the horizontals are segregated to provide independent services and have an inclination to increase their share of business. As a result, the concept of integrated services gets limited to these divisions coming together to provide respective services offered by them to the serviced organization. Hence the integration usually remains at the service offering levels but lacks collaboration at the function level.

 

Listed below are some of the challenges that need attention while considering Integrated service offerings:

 

·         Knowledge of the entire landscape – do you have that access?

Knowing the landscape end-to-end is the key to offering integrated services. This involves the discovery exercise – knowing business processes, mapping these to the application landscape, understanding the metadata and then penetrating into the underlying infrastructure and networking layer. Understanding this mesh is critical to knowing the areas of operation and then proposing Integrated Services.

·         Do you understand the gamut of services required and the ones that you can provide?

It is very important to understand where you fit, where you can offer the required services in this cluster. It is not about the offerings you have in these areas but knowing where you can excel the existing service provider and what is the underlying principle of your claim for excellence. The key here is to find that differentiating factor and the value add that you can bring with this change.

·         Have you analyzed the criticality and risks associated to the business with the change?

Many a times it is better to have a third eye in few segments of the processing cycle. For instance, you may consciously want to reconsider keeping the development services and the relevant testing services with the same service provider? This is probably one area where competition and disintegration may actually help the serviced organization reduce the risk for themselves and the service provider.

·         Have you accounted for the elevated customer expectation that will come along with the integrated services?

Increased productivity gains, improved efficiency, multiple value-adds, increased responsibility with expanded managed services and reduction in the cost are some of the areas where the customer expectations will rise and hence they have to be accounted in the proposal while targeting integrated service offerings.

 

The expanding need for the managed services model that brings cost efficiency, lesser overload, reduced pressure on governance, will increase the need and temptation for integrated service offering. Besides the benefits, it is equally important to honestly consider the preparedness and the risks associated with your proposal of offering Integrated service.

Are you really ready and capable of offering the services at much better levels?

Why do we always tumble upon capturing the business flow?

Case scenario:
The transition starts. A team of techies is on-boarded to absorb the knowledge from the existing teams. Along with them comes a Business Analyst. The process starts by asking basic questions on what does application do and how the data flows. The Business Analyst captures the flow and the interfaces. He plots a block diagram showcasing this flow and starts explaining the team.

 

The team takes this input and starts getting in the nuances of the components and the processes. As a result, we get a document in the play back session indicating the ‘business flow’ and the ‘Key Operating Procedures’, which is the run-book of the support operations. On successfully delivering this confidence, the transition is considered to be completed and signed-off. Sounds familiar?  

 

What is missing here?

 

The business flow that the Business Analyst captured there is not the BUSINESS FLOW. It is just the data flow within the applications. And surprisingly, this sails most of the time. The problem comes when we are attempting to support a functionally complex environment.

 

So what’s the Business Flow?

 

Let’s take an example: When you go for withdrawing money through your ATM machine, the transaction consists of partial Business flow and an application flow. Your intent to withdraw funds though an automated machine is part of the business flow, the business level checks to identify the client and check limits and conditions are part of the Business flow whereas the actual transaction of card insertion, validation and cash dispensation is the application flow.  

What’s the business here?

 

The business is about providing facility to withdraw funds from the Bank. Once the decision is made, the client has few options – using a teller, using an ATM or using a home service (for few) through Internet banking. The Business process consists of all these options. Option 2 is about using ATM for withdrawals and hence, as part of Business process, it is essential to check the validity of the customer and check his limits before providing a clearance for dispensing cash.

As part of application flow, you have hardware and software interacting for completing this business process. ATM m/c reads the card, a server validates the card and maps to the client’s account and then the data travels through different servers to check, validate and instruct the hardware to dispense cash.

Understanding this differentiation in the Application support environment is extremely critical to understanding the Business flow and the application flow. What we generally capture is the application flow which is not true reflection of what we understand about the function being executed. It is important to understand this difference and get this captured appropriately.

Why stickiness to a domain and mastering the same along with your technical knowledge will be the most sought after skill in future?

There is one school of thought which emphasizes on ITIL processes to bring in the required efficiency in the Application support engagements. There is another school of thought which finds the need for in-depth experience in supporting critical applications. Both the thought processes exists today.

I believe that in the current scheme of things, the model that will really sustain for long will be the one that hires relevant people with right mix of technical skills supported by very good understanding of the business. This requires stickiness to the domain for the techies. An inclination to continuously work in a given domain gives you enough understanding of that domain to be called as specialist and be hired and retained for the job.

Some of the attributes that will necessitate the stickiness to the domain in the current and future environment are as follows:    

• Production Support (AMS) landscape is changing – from non-critical processes to core processes, from back office work to client facing jobs, from in-house applications to COTS products, from one area in business to entire landscape, from staff augmentation jobs to managed services 

• Changes in US laws for work visas will create a need for specialist and quality resources – driven by difficulty in getting visas and the higher base salary structure 

• Managed Services model requiring the vendor to completely own the services provided

• Increasing emphasis on improving the productivity within the engagements

• Rise in attrition due to requirement of high pressure work in business critical front office areas, especially financial product trading domain

• Reducing transition time due to cost pressure

• Rising cost of resources and the need to cross skill and run the engagement with minimum resources 

• Misalignment in understanding of a process by a Business Analyst to a technical resource working on the same application in the AMS engagement

Being from the financial trading background, I have seen this in multiple cases where the outsourcing becomes extremely difficult due to lack of this appropriate mix in the resources deployed in these projects. Issues such as lack of the quality, delayed responses and fix, very high attrition rate and difficulty in managing the basic daily operations in these projects to achieve a normal BAU become norm.

The only thing that will bring value in these accounts in terms of sustainability, improved efficiency, better productivity and bandwidth for experimenting with new effective operating models will be hiring people with this right mix of knowledge. The resources will be the key as ITIL will become the norm for processes but there is no alternative for knowledge and the passion of an employee to work in such domains under stressful environment.

 

A win-win situation for the outsourcing company and for people being recruited as specialist to run this newly outsourced business. As the outsourcing vendor can boast of the knowledge and experience it has in that field to leverage new business, so will the resource gain in terms of higher remuneration and sustained job prospects.

That’s why I believe that stickiness to domain along with a mix of relevant technology skill will be the need going forward and will redefine the on-boarding in large outsourcing engagements.    

Changing Customer expectation around value addition to the business by an outsourced Application Support service provider?

As an IT support service provider,

Ø  What additional visibility you bring for the data accessed / accumulated through monitoring or resolution of IT tickets? 

Ø    Is your monthly report, which is based on ITIL framework, usable by the Operations team to bring in improvements?  What value it brings to the Business?

Ø  What kind of platform have you built between IT & Operations to discuss the issues, responsibilities and improvement on common grounds?

Ø  Can you identify the Business Impact areas for the IT tickets?

Ø  Besides your IT support expertise, are you able to understand my business well to provide reduction in the number of IT tickets?

The answers to most of these can be found in the way business knowledge is used in the Application Support engagement; the way you understand the subject; or an approach by which you share your IT support data with Operations.  

Do you agree? Pls share your views.

(Pls see my blogs where I express my views on the need to have relevant business understanding and the approach to build that framework in order to institutionalize the process)

Significance of Governance while setting a new engagement

There are numerous articles on Governance, Effective Governance, and Importance of Governance etc. The objective here is not to share the basics of Governance but to look at an effective practical implementation indicating how it works wonders in the success of setting up a new engagement.

The number one priority in one of the successful multi-million dollar engagement, which I lead during seeding of the account was to set up and diligently follow the Governance model agreed at the beginning of the engagement. Here is how it worked:

 

1.     Define and agree on the Governance structure before the start of the activity.

It is absolutely essential to invest that time and effort to define a detailed Governance structure, the meeting cadence and the reporting format even before you start an activity – be in Due-diligence, transition, Steady state or any other initiative that you pursue in your engagement.

2.     Get the buy-in from Sponsor and the critical stakeholders for the review meetings

This is absolutely critical to resolve the issues immediately while in teething stage. Getting their attention continuously helps you resolve many obstacles and help you get timely actions from other stiff team members/managers. It is essential to block the sponsor and critical stakeholder’s calendars and make sure that they attend the same by creating decision points for them during the entire duration of the activity. Regular scrum also helps in breaking through the problem and discussing solutions.

3.     Regular reviews of progress and action points by Senior Management.

Regular review and attention by the Senior Management helps prevent any slippage of the project and helps keep the overall engagement in Green. For the large engagements, if not weekly plan for bi-monthly reviews with Senior Management and bring the action points in the stakeholder review meetings.  

4.     Detailed reports with an Executive summary that encapsulate the activities, progress and the issues.  

Reporting is critical to the success of the meetings and keeping the attention of Sr Management. It makes a whole world of difference in how these reports are produced and what kind of data is captured in them. The report should have a clear understanding of the progress, the timelines and the actions in brief indicating the owners for the same.   

5.     Make efforts to explain the concept, actions and progress to stakeholders.

It is essential to explain the processes timely to everyone in order to understand the output and benefits. This also helps raise any requirement with the sponsor while trying to get that activity rolling. This will help you get the process implemented with their help.

Bottom line: Bring that Sponsor and the Senior Management focus in the engagement through regular periodic meetings & reviews and emphasize on the detailed, clear and precise reporting to see the success of the engagement rollover.