Moving from IT issue management to Business issue management

I remember the story of a Father & Son that Leadership advisor, Robin Sharma, narrates in his leadership talk. In this story, the kid was constantly troubling his father for attention while the father was reading a newspaper. The father gets an idea and he tears one part of paper in small pieces with a picture of a globe on it and asks his son to fix it assuming that it will keep him engaged for some time. The son came back almost immediately with the solution and the father was surprised to see his son coming back so soon. Father asked his son how did he do it? The son replied that there was a picture of a man behind the paper. Once the man was put in place, the world was OK.

How true is this case when applying in Application Production Support context? Most of the times we are constantly engaged in setting the World together, finding it difficult to join pieces and spending more time figuring it out. We miss the simpler picture of the Business flow / knowledge. Once you get the basics of business correct, the support solution should always be ok and effective.    

That brings us to deliberate on the significance of the business knowledge in the IT support. Debating on why it makes sense to move from IT issue management to Business issue management.

In my earlier blogs, I discussed about the frameworks that you can build to bring the business focus into the Application support environment. The foundation built for this framework should provide inputs for this movement from IT issue management to Business issue management.

Here are few guidelines:

1.      Focus on understanding the requirement from business perspective. Once you understand the business flow, being a techie you should be able to figure out the cause and the solution.

2.      Build a foundation early in the engagement for identifying the business impact. Once you understand the business impact, you will be able to prioritize the work more efficiently.

3.      It helps in how you report the issues (Business focused) – if larger audience can understand the reports you have produced, you are more likely to get improvement solutions from different organizations. All helping you to resolve a business issue than the IT instance you would have generally should you have looked it as an IT issue.

4.      Validate all your understanding with business. Your solution and reports will be more precise if you have validated your understanding from the business.   

 

Focusing on business issue will create that synergy with the business or operations and you will be able to build that level playing, data driven decision making platform, which will also enable Business Alignment in your engagements.

Identifying value creation opportunities while focusing on elements of Business Alignment

Many CIOs want to create business impact but are stymied by the lack of complete visibility of the IT landscape AND/or by the sub-optimal performance of IT assets, IT support staff;  support teams who have access to the rich business information. We should develop models that can enable and deliver measurable business value via superior development and management of IT assets.

Here are some of the challenges we observe when we try to apply this in customer context

1.      Almost every organization will have this challenge of insufficient understanding of their constantly changing landscape. The first action should  address ‘Insufficiently known landscape’

2.      Secondly, process failure related issues which impacts downstream processes and customers. Are we proactively managing the risks with little or no impact on the existing landscape? Are we able to monitor critical business processes in real time and provide business insights? The next action should be to address ‘Insufficient monitoring and reporting of critical business processes’, leading to unknown impact of IT failures and inability to enable pro-active remediation efforts including some of the non-IT errors.

3.      Last but not the least ask how IT support can deliver continuous improvements and does your IT boost your competitive advantage? Most of the time your efforts are on addressing IT cost reduction without understanding a business impact. Next objective – Can we start looking at larger business issues rather than addressing and focusing on just IT cost reduction?

As a strategic partner, systematically look at larger business areas, resolving business issues and creating business alignment at different levels and in the process you will detect value creation opportunities using IT.

Significance of the domain in your ability to support - Using domain knowledge into daily support operations

Most of us will agree that understanding the domain is critical to production support engagements. The question is what do we do about it, how do we use it, do we structure our transition, our operations aligned with this understanding of the business?

Many of you might agree that we approach by traditional way of using a BA to understand the ‘flow’ and at the end most of the times what you get is the ‘application flow’. Unfortunately, this is misunderstood as capturing functional knowledge of that business. And we conveniently call this as domain understanding.  

I have seen multiple Production support engagements of different sizes and almost always observed this trend. We are mistakenly calling application knowledge integrated with basics of higher function as ‘domain understanding’.

So the question is how do we possibly understand the domain and make use of this knowledge during seeding a new engagement or reviving the existing engagement?

Here are three ideas that will help you build a framework around capturing the domain and make it a contributor in the support operations at different stages of the engagement lifecycle:

Idea 1: Start understanding the domain/business before the application knowledge transition – find the significance of using that product before using or fixing the same.

Starting with an emphasis on the domain gives you an edge. It gives you a perspective of the business and the issue areas, which will enable you to structure the transition and the Operations in line with the requirements.

Idea 2: Use the understanding of the domain to enrich support metrics – I call this Business Aligned Metrics

Metrics is very powerful to provide visibility and enriching these reports aligned to the functions provides you a platform to interact with the business and bring productivity gains early in the engagement.  

Idea 3: Understand the business impact area and focus more energy towards that area – Identify the Business Impact of that issue

Knowing the business impact is critical to focusing your energy in right direction. Instead of making statement like xx incidents in S2, convert these to the functional impact area. The business will love this representation and you would have found an opportunity to interact and do problem management in that area. Enriching the business understanding in these areas will strengthen and make the operations more efficient.

Three areas of value addition in the Production support outsourcing engagement

Area 1: Providing Faster, Cheaper and Better services at an aggregate level.

Outsourcing is all about managing risks while controlling the cost.

-       During transition, the business is at risk and the environment is wobbly. The biggest value addition at this point is to get to Steady State at earliest while managing the related risks

-       The perception is that curtailing cost may compromise the quality of the work. A demonstration of additional benefits that can be brought along with the main stream support, make this a valuable proposal

-       Usually, in a legacy environment or in an existing outsourced environment, introducing processes, metrics and good governance can bring distinguished value to the customer.

Area 2:  Early Transformation benefits resulting in better Productivity gains

Usually, transformation is attempted at the later part of the engagement and most of the time it is almost expected. The key here is to achieve this early in the game. The metrics that is presented as part of the support engagement, can result in multiple transformational ideas.

Area 3: Exceeding expectations of attaining stability

The risk of instability in the business environment and failure is the area of biggest concern. Every engagement assumes and expects to attain stability in certain period of time. Attaining it before this time period creates good value add for the customer. The key here is to show these progressively in phases.

Business Alignment as a lever for Transformation and Value addition in outsourced Production support engagements

Often customers talk about or in many cases complain about lack of transformation activities taken up by the support teams during their tenure of involvement with the customer. Traditionally, the Production support was meant to be providing support to keep the lights on. With the surge in cost pressure and more value for the money, the customers are continuously seeking and expecting an increased return for their bucks. What kind of strategies can be adopted to bring this value to the customer?

One of the most influential areas is looking at transformation which can give them wider benefits besides the cost advantage.

If you are in Production Support (called as RTB – Run-The-Bank, in banks) engagements, you would have definitely felt the pressure to enable transformation in your areas of involvement.

Defended below are three illusions pertaining to the Transformation initiative in Production Support engagements.

1: Transformation can only start in Steady state when you have understood the complete landscape and business of the customer

Defense: Transformation can start from Day 1 of your involvement with your customer. Some of the areas that can be looked at from Day 1 are as follows:

-       Introducing a new Operating model

-       Transition with a difference – bring in domain led transition

-       Introducing new processes in governance, reporting, metrics etc

2: Transition from client supported resources to an outsourcer in an on-site/Offshore model is itself a transformation providing a big cost advantage. Not much can be provided while changing guards.

Defense: The word for this is transition and not transformation. Cost advantage is implicit if it has to be taken over by a service provider. It is critical to look at other areas for making this sweeping change;

-       Metrics (bring the element of transparency)

-       Bring in domain focus – start building foundation for defining the business impact at a later date

-       Automation

3: Being in Production support area, the possibilities are limited to technology transformation or at most technical process transformation

Defense: Production data is the most valuable asset that the team supporting these areas can use. The data can lead to various opportunities to explore:

-       Process transformation – the simplest one based on what you experience.

-       Business Alignment – use data to create meaningful insights for the business. Restructure reports submitted to the business to reflect these data points and build that alignment platform.

-       Adopting LEAN principles in structure, operations and process