www.goitil.co.uk - IT Management for SME's

All new articles will now be posted at:

www.goitil.co.uk/blog.html

A full history of our articles has also been moved to this address

1) How a small business could hold a supplier review for its IT services where no account management exists

2) The credit crunch time has arrived. How can we save money on our IT services ?

One of the things I have enjoyed most about this blog, is being able to pass both my experience and viewpoints over to both service management professionals and businesses who are not necessarily skilled in IT.
Having a look at the stats for the blog, the two most popular topics (which actually stand out by a mile!) are as follows:

1) Application sizing and capacity modeling
2) The expanded incident lifecycle

I am not sure why these are so popular, but in order to continue to fill this niche / requirement, I am quite happy to share my viewpoints and experiences with people. I will certainly look to develop a number of articles about this, but if you have a question or viewpoint you would like to share / discuss, please do not hesitate to email me on:

enquiry@goitil.co.uk

As the heading of this blog states - "Consultancy costs, but advice and viewpoints are free"

ITIL Topic covered
Service Level Management

Share and share alike!

A recent client has given me permission to anonymously post a summary of a service management audit on both the blog and the website as a way of sharing how small businesses could benefit from such a review. The client in question was a motor trader who had been in business for several years, running a successful car sales business with a well established reputation in the area. They openly admitted that they were car sales professionals who had cut their teeth in the market but did not really have much of an ideal about IT. The initial consultation came abut as their windows based PC kept throwing up messages about an unlicensed copy of XP and they were thinking about buying a new PC to get rid of it. Within 2 hrs of spending time with them the following points were unearthed:

1) They did not need to buy a new PC. They had picked it up from a computer fair and it was riddled with copied software. The main PC was of a good spec and we were able to source a local PC guy who could rebuild it and price up XP, office and an anti virus product to bring them up to compliance
2) They had no disaster recovery for their two main services (email and autotrader updater) but once again we were able to discuss how these services could be accessed from another PC with a view of installing the auto trader application on a second PC at one of the owners houses as a contingency plan
3) Two key suppliers needed reviewing. Firstly it appeared that their website hosting and delivery to the internet had not been written to current standards and did not capitalise on any Search Engine Optimisation. Secondly their credit card authorisation company had been delivering a poor service for some months, but they did not really know where to go

A report was provided outlining the key points and possible solutions and is currently being reviewed by the client.

If you feel this type of service would benefit your small business and you would like to see a copy of the report (in which the identity of the company has been masked) please feel to contact us on:

enquiry@goitil.co.uk

quoting CustRep01

ITIL Topic covered
Service Level Management

For the majority of SME’s, the main IT suppliers may be faceless organisations whose main method of contact is via a website or if you are really lucky a call centre. Just because the supplier does not provide you with a personable account manager, does not discount the fact that you should avoid carrying out a regular service review.

Going back to the principles of good service management, the key objectives are to maintain or improve system uptime, to reduce costs and to drive better value for the companies IT services.

Taking these principles as our guiding light, we can still carryout a service review for our faceless suppliers.

How ?

Well let’s take a few typical suppliers:
1) Voice and Data Telephony supplier
2) Web Hosting Service
3) Main Hardware Procurement Source

What do they all have in common?

Well firstly they provide a service, probably one that can be measured and hopefully with a level service availability. This may not be clearly quoted in your contract documentation or may be implied but with a bit of pushing your supplier may provide a “target” figure
Secondly, they will carry a cost of service and one that could be compared with other like for like suppliers.
Finally a soft measurement of customer service could be established based upon you engagements with them.

So now we have a couple of points of focus but how do we use this information to carryout a service review? Well the first thing that needs to be decided is how often to carryout the review. This may be driven by a renewal date, a regular cycle (eg every 3 months) or may be triggered by an outage or bad customer service experience. Either way, the trigger for the service review needs to be established.

Once you decided to have the review, get any support documents or contracts out and look for information relating to service metrics. You are looking for measurements, service charters, targets, in fact anything which can be measured. If nothing exists, contact your supplier and ask them what their service metrics are (eg if I lost voice capability, how quickly after placing a call should I expect an engineer and then following that how quickly should I get it fixed). Also ask them where they publish their results or if they don’t how you are able to access them.
Next, it would be worth while digging out any commercial documents Get a feel for the cost of the service you are paying for and if possible get a few like for like quotes from other companies. Don’t forget to factor in any exit costs and the cost of moving supplier including any costs in terms of time etc.
Finally write down your thoughts regarding how you feel about your supplier. A good way to do this is to create two simple lists titled “Highs” and “Lows”. Record any good points under the Highs and any bad points under the Lows.

In the next chapter of this subject, we will focus on how to actually carry out the service review.