Reactive to Proactive - How to Break the Cycle of Fire Fighting?
A common problem for IT organisations is how to break the never ending cycle of daily “fire fighting”. Frameworks such as ITIL provide a comprehensive end to end framework in which to deliver service efficiency and stability, however, reaching an ITIL Eutopia is usually limited by cultural and budgetary constraints. Given these constraints, most organisations who are committed to Continuous Service Improvement (CSI) must rely on existing over burdened resources to drive the change required. In the majority of cases, this challenge alone results in CSI activities taking a back seat to daily support priorities. Net result is the defined benefits are never actually realised and the fire fighting cycle is never broken!
To overcome this challenge, as a 1st step we believe it is imperative to focus in on only those initiatives that quickly reduces the time burden on the IT Support organisation. Freeing up resource headroom quickly will allow organisations sufficient resource bandwidth the time to focus on more complex and time intensive service transformation activities.
The Applaud Managed Services team has developed a set of 4 Continuous Service Improvement pillars in which to build out these 1st set of focussed initiatives. Automating processes such as Password Reset management are relatively quick to implement and can reduce the daily support overhead at the Service Desk by up to 20%.
Mark Richards
Managed Services Practice Manager
