John Sansbury

Articles by John Sansbury

• Incident ManagementMembers

  Leading Service Desk Practices

• Stakeholders & EngagementMembers

  Team Leader Responsibilities

• Metrics & ReportingMembers

  Service Desk Performance Measurement

• Incident ManagementMembers

  The ‘Shift Left’ Practice

• Incident ManagementMembers

  The Service Desk as the Eyes and Ears of the Organisation

• ITIL®Members

  Keep it Simple and Practical

• Service StrategyMembers

  The Four Dimensions of Service Management and Why Each One Matters

  The four dimensions of service management, and why neglecting any one of them undermines service quality. Based on The Journey to Service Excellence.

• Change & TransformationMembers

  Using Kotter's Eight Steps to Drive a Service Management Transformation

  How Kotter's eight-step change model guides a successful service management transformation, drawn from The Journey to Service Excellence.

• Stakeholders & EngagementMembers

  Stakeholder Mapping: Know Your Customer Before You Chase Value

  You cannot focus on value until you know your stakeholders. How to build a stakeholder map, drawn from The Journey to Service Excellence.

• Problem ManagementMembers

  Incident Prevention Versus Incident Fix

  Why proactive operation is harder than it sounds, the four barriers that hold teams back, and how to make the shift from fixing to preventing.

• Value StreamsMembers

  How Service Management can Transform Your Enterprise

  Services, value co-creation, outcomes versus outputs and processes: how service management can transform your enterprise, drawn from The Journey to Service Excellence.

• Change & TransformationMembers

  Shaping Your Service Management Transformation Programme

  How to shape a service management transformation programme: objectives, governance and the five phases, based on The Journey to Service Excellence.

• Value StreamsMembers

  Value Streams and the Consumer Journey

  Why value streams are the key to service excellence: the happy path, mapping failure points and protecting the consumer experience.

• Continual ImprovementMembers

  Continual Service Improvement: More Than Improving Services

  What continual service improvement really means, the CSI model, who should lead it, where to start and how to run a CSI register.

• Change & TransformationMembers

  Adopting a New Process, Step by Step

  A step by step guide to adopting a service management process: commitment, ownership, policy, RACI, KPIs, deployment and optimisation.

• ESM

  “I just need to know”: why consistency beats speed

  Her words, recorded in The Journey to Service Excellence, belong above every service desk in higher education: “I don't care whether it's one week or three weeks, I just need to know so that I can provide enough notice to be able to plan…

• ESMMembers

  The freezer, the certificate and the one person who knows

  Carriers in eleven countries were affected the same day. Nobody knew it was a single point of failure. Nobody knew it was about to expire. The compensation Ericsson was believed to have paid O2 alone was in the order of £100 million.

• ESMMembers

  “We are brilliant in a crisis” is not the compliment you think

  It sounds rude. It is actually the most useful sentence in the book, and it applies to every hard-pressed IT and Estates team in higher education.

• ESMMembers

  Every dashboard is green. The lab is cold and the portal is down.

  In The Journey to Service Excellence, John Sansbury tells a story that captures it. His brother and sister-in-law queued for over an hour for a cross-Channel ferry that was visibly docked and due to sail in fifteen minutes. No announceme…

• Metrics & Reporting

  The Star Salesperson Who Was Quietly Destroying Profit

  An outbound sales contact centre noticed one agent massively outselling everyone else. Managers listened in on her calls, hoping to bottle the magic.

• Availability & Risk

  One Expired Certificate Took Down a National Mobile Network

  On 6 December 2018, millions of O2 customers in the UK lost data services. In Japan, SoftBank went down the same day. Carriers in 11 countries were affected.

• Metrics & Reporting

  The £10 That Gamed a National Service Award

  A major UK utility once won a Chartermark for its customer commitment, including a promise to pay £10 to any consumer for a missed appointment.

• ITIL®

  The Frameworks Tell You What. They Were Never Meant to Tell You How.

  Here is a sentence from one of the leading service management framework textbooks, quoted in The Journey to Service Excellence: most of the content "should be taken as a suggestion of areas that an organisation might consider", a catalogue of topics to think about, "not a list of answers".

• ESM

  Your Organisation Chart Is Quietly Working Against Your Customers

  Look at your organisation chart. Every box is a capability. Applications. Infrastructure. HR. Finance. Estates. Now ask where on that chart your customer's experience lives.

• Problem Management

  "We Are Really Good at Incident Management." "I Am Sorry to Hear That."

  A CIO recently telephoned the author of The Journey to Service Excellence and proudly announced that his organisation was really good at incident management. The reply: "I am sorry to hear that."

• Metrics & Reporting

  The Watermelon Effect: Every Metric Green, Every Customer Angry

  There is a name for the most common disease in service reporting. The watermelon effect. Green on the outside, red on the inside. Every metric on the dashboard is positive, and the customers are furious.

• Incident Management

  The £366 Million Incident: What Downtime Really Costs

  In 2018, TSB moved its customers off the Lloyds Banking Group systems and onto a new platform of its own. On switchover, the new system promptly crashed. By the time the dust settled, the bill had reached £366 million. That included around £130 million in customer compensation, £49 million in fraud and operational losses, £122 million spent fixing the technology, and £34 million in lost income from waived fees. Some 80,000 customers switched their accounts away, against 50,000 the year before.

• Problem ManagementMembers

  Problem management that prevents incidents

  Problem management exists to reduce the number and impact of incidents. It has two halves: reactive, which investigates incidents that have occurred, and proactive, which hunts for risks before they bite.

• ITIL®Members

  Adopting a service value system in ITIL 4

  ITIL® 4 reframes service management around the service value system, or SVS. Rather than a linear lifecycle, the SVS describes how every component and activity of an organisation works together to enable value creation.