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“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…
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
"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."
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.
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.
DevOpsMembers
Platform teams and the service desk
Platform teams build the paved roads that product teams travel: self-service infrastructure, golden paths and sensible defaults. The service desk handles the human moments when those roads run out.
AgileMembers
Flow metrics for service teams
Flow metrics describe how work moves, not how busy people are. Four of them do most of the work: throughput, cycle time, work in progress, and the age of items still in progress.
ESMMembers
Extending service management beyond IT
Enterprise service management, or ESM, applies service management principles beyond the IT department. HR onboarding, facilities requests and finance approvals are all services with requesters, providers and service levels.
Problem ManagementMembers
Blameless post-incident reviews that stick
The purpose of a post-incident review is to learn, not to attribute fault. The moment participants sense blame, the quality of information collapses. People defend rather than explain, and the systemic causes stay hidden.
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.