| Sponsor's Objectives |
To improve the company's brand image by reducing outages related to IT server capacity; to strengthen a business case; and to get to the bottom of some workflow manager team finger-pointing. |
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| Business & Financial Impacts |
Improve the brand by reducing server capacity related outages; justify a $US 2M business case; improve IT staff ($US 10M+) productivity. |
| Workshop Days |
2 Days in session, 1 day documenting & reviewing |
| Process Triage™ Examinations |
Points of Pain, Workflow Demand, Speed, Milestone Quality, Risk-of-Failure Points |
| Participants |
5 Managers, 6 Expert Contributors |
| Results |
Business case was approved; server outages decreased. The executive sponsor focused on the high pain-points of insufficient engineering requirements (Deliverable #60) and understanding poor Logical Capacity Requirements (Deliverable #170), plus some focused coaching on improving server monitoring (the #500's deliverables). |
Participant Comments (verbatim, warts and all)
| Was this process mapping and analysis effort worth your the company's investment? |
| Yes. I’ve learned a great deal about the overall process and about how to clearly identify pains and fix problems. |
| Yes, by supporting revenue and financial services; the need an understanding of what processes are in place for storage. Identifying weakness was great; follow through will be a challenge. |
| Yes. Fostered understanding. Fostered team building. |
| Yes, having the [server expeerts] present was most beneficial. |
| Yes. This process helped us to understand the entire end-to-end process and explain to other groups what my role / stake in the process is. We were also able to obtain information regarding the failure points in the process and came up with action items to improve these steps. Very helpful! |
| This was a very worthwhile exercise. Everyone learned. .Progress was made to a point – lack of attendance hindered us Note 1 |
| If improvements result, than it was well worth the time. There needs to be more sessions like this for other IT processes. Of course, these sessions will only be valuable if changes result in process improvement. |
| Yes. I liked the [mapping]) effort. All the experts were required to capture the size of the map. |
| Yes. This level of detail could not have been achieved without a structured approach and appropriate experts' involvement. The knowledge gained was extremely beneficial and will contribute significantly toward the development of our strategy and improvement opportunities. |
| Yes, it was very useful to understand the storage problems. |
| Would you recommend this activity / methodology to a peer? |
| Yes, [ditto], [ditto], [ditto] |
| Yes. This was a sample effort that will be applied to future operations architecture initiatives. |
| Definitely worthwhile for peers and process improvement projects. |
| Absolutely. These types of activities are the only way we will locate where the breakdown in our processes is. |
| Absolutely. A Release Management / Environment [another IT function] mapping would benefit [our organization]. |
| Definitely. Having all of the representatives from the different departments in the room at once really helped to flush out the process |
| Yes, inter-organizational group problems can be solved or solutions explored quickly. Mr. Rosenberger is a very good facilitator. |
| Yes! This has been my second session. My director still uses the one I sponsored 1½ years ago! |
| Yes. The clarity that comes from mapping a process is invaluable. |
| How would you improve the experience, if any? (Room, food, attendees, facilitation, methodology, etc.) |
| Please provide lunch. |
| Maintain attendance levels – requires expert contributor's management support. Some experts were not available throughout all the session. |
| Provide lunch so the session can continue to get more things done in 2-day session. Participants need to dedicate [the] whole two days on this session. Missing some people; in some cases [made] the thinking process must longer or not accurate. |
| Everything was very good except attendance. Managers need to release subject matter experts to attend these sessions all the way through. |
| Attendance monitoring and reporting @ Assistant Vice President/ Director level would add value. |
| Try to get commitments from attendees for the full time. We were short the key people in the process (SD) for the last two hours of the 2nd day. |
| Expert particpants must commit to be present through the whole session. |
| Room was too cold. |
| There is a sense in which it is more high-level than some of our day-to-day activities. So more detail could be attempted. Note 2 |
| It seems that there were some questions early-on about the goals of the session. A quorum of all SME’s is needed until the end to ensure all tasks are completed. Observation: It appeared that most of the process is what is being done today rather than “best practices.” It would have been good to discuss in depth ways to make revolutionary changes to improve the end result. |
| It seems that there were some questions early-on about the goals of the session. A quorum of all SME’s is needed until the end to ensure all tasks are completed. Observation: It appeared that most of the process is what is being done today rather than “best practices.” It would have been good to discuss in depth ways to make revolutionary changes to improve the end result. Note 3 |
| Facilitator Notes |
| 1 Service Delivery [organization's experts] left at a crucial point during the second day. Facilitator attempted to have them stay but to no avail; sponsor was unable to resolve. |
| 2 More follow-up detail is planned in [the sponsor's] schedule. |
3 “Revolutionary changes” typically involve improvements of process speed by an order of magnitude (See Harrington’s 1990’s work). The process the expert's mapped represents "required work", but it is not implemented with “best practices”. See the pain overlay.
Rosey's 2010 note added:
The most ambitious next step would be to apply CEMMethod® Outside-In modeling, and rid the process of any work that does not support a Successful Customer Outcome (SCO). IOW, Make sure the milestone deliverables matter; fix any quality issues, then -- and only then attempt to speed things up and drive out cost; otherwise you'll just create crap faster. |
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Rosey's Remarks
This workshop was commissioned to strengthen an IT business case for US$2M more CapEx for server technologies (processing power).
Their boss wanted some end-to-end asset lifecycle analysis to determine if the existing inventory was being managed well enough, as contradictory (finger pointing) narratives about root problems raised investment doubts .
The business case was approved. At the same time, some workflow policies were set up to keep architects from being cut out of the loop by the break-fix staff.
This is a good example for the executives who manages depreciable assets. |
