The purpose of this chapter is to provide, for those either new to the role or considering taking on such a role, an insight into the typical working day and activities of an SLM. Clearly this will vary not only from day to day but also from organisation to organisation.
Your first task of the day is to learn about any major incidents that occurred since you last checked. Even if these were managed within service levels, it is vital that you understand what happened, which parts of the business were affected and how.
If the customers affected by the incident(s) have not yet contacted you, you should contact them to appraise them of the circumstances, impact and remedial activities IT has completed or is undertaking. My preferred means for doing this would be the phone rather than email. However, if you can’t reach the customer by telephone, leave a voicemail and send a text message with the incident number and brief details and ask them to call you. Customers dislike nothing more than being kept in the dark.
What you’re trying to determine and communicate is the business impact of the incident(s) and the estimated time to restore the service.
Depending on how critical IT services are to your business, you may take an even more proactive approach by asking to be kept informed of major incidents outside office hours. You will want to avoid a situation where you learn about incidents from your customers before you do from your colleagues.
If major or significant incidents have occurred (typically the highest two levels of priority), it is likely that a significant proportion of your day is going to be focused on gaining an understanding from your IT colleagues about the incident(s) and communicating appropriately with your customers.
Hopefully this will not be typical of your day! You will instead be engaged somewhere in the cycle of gathering and reviewing performance reports, and meeting or otherwise engaging with your customers.
PERFORMANCE REPORTS AND SERVICE IMPROVEMENT
Assuming you have several customers, you already have SLAs in place with them and you meet with them perhaps on a monthly basis, most of your time between meetings is going to be spent preparing performance reports or working on service improvement programmes. As already indicated, it is not your responsibility to gather performance data; this is the role of the operational teams, such as the service desk, incident management and change teams as well as service owners. Instead, you should be gathering information from these teams and collating it into reports on a per-customer basis.
Obviously there will be some things to report that are of interest or relevance to all customers, but your opposite numbers will also appreciate regular reporting specifically relevant to their business unit, rather than simply a review of overall IT performance. If the systems and toolsets don’t report by customer, this might need to be handcrafted by you.
Hopefully, much of the reporting will be automated, leaving you with the task of interpreting the statistics. From a customer perspective, the best reports comprise a combination of three aspects.
• Charts of performance against service levels – the value of charts is that they can clearly show trends.
• Tables of values used in the charts – it is a truism that some people (most notably those who work in finance) are sceptical of charts and prefer to see actual values. You therefore need to ensure that these are included in the reports.
• The most important part of any performance report is the interpretation of variances and, in particular, missed service levels.
The third of these aspects will make up the bulk of your daily activities and provide the focus for your customer meeting preparation. This can be an interesting part of your work. While your customers will obviously want to know how well IT has met their requirements, their main focus will be what caused service levels to be affected and what IT is doing to recover and prevent a recurrence of the situation.
To handle your customer meetings effectively, you will need to discuss with your IT colleagues the circumstances of IT’s management of incidents, service requests and requests for change. Your objective is to provide full information to your customers to improve their confidence in and satisfaction with IT services.
A word of warning – never assume that statistics are correct, even those that are produced by the systems and toolsets. One of your key tasks is therefore to assure the accuracy of the data you will present to your customers to ensure their continued confidence in you and your reporting.
Spending the majority of your time talking to your customers and in meetings with them is usually the best use of your time. Whether or not your organisation employs BRMs or account managers, your role will be instrumental in influencing your customer’s perception of IT.
In my personal experience, the industry was shortsighted to remove the ‘C’ from what in the 1980s, with the integration of the network teams into IT, became ‘ICT’, where ‘C’ stands for ‘Communications.’ Sadly, the skill and activity most often in short supply in IT is communication. Your role as SLM is one of the key interfaces between the IT service provider and their customer and, along with the BRM, you should be knowledgeable about how IT technology can support business processes and activities. Part of your day-to-day role therefore should be to promote and contribute to effective communication.
For instance, one of the easy mistakes to make in this role is assume that the performance reports and statistics you present tell the full story. The best example of this is that on the hopefully not so rare occasion that IT meets all its service levels one month, you may be surprised to find out that your customers are not necessarily completely satisfied with the services provided. In many, if not most, cases this can be a consequence of inadequate or incomplete communication.
I can offer an example from personal experience. Having documented the SLA with the finance department and meeting the customer’s service levels consistently over a period of time, I met with the finance director and asked if she was happy with the service. Confidently expecting a positive answer, I was slightly disappointed to hear, ‘Yes, but...’ The ‘but’ was qualified as follows.
‘Once a month on a Friday night, you run a suite of batch jobs. If one of those fails, you have rerun procedures, but what you fail to realise is that one of those jobs produces the trial balance. This in turn produces a printout that you send to the head office where we have three people coming in at 09:00 on overtime in order to check the figures.’
‘OK’, I said, ‘so what do you want me to do if the job fails?’
‘Call me’, she said.
‘But it runs at 03:00 in the morning!’
‘Nonetheless, call me, tell me the cause of the failure, what you’re doing to restore the situation and when we can expect the printout to arrive.’
‘And what will you do?’
‘I’ll call the three people I’ve booked to come in on overtime and let them know what time they should aim to arrive at head office, based on what you’ve told me. That way, they don’t have to get out of bed so early on a Saturday morning and I don’t have to pay them overtime to read the papers.’
For me, this was a telling insight. Too often in IT we hide behind the numbers and fail to recognise the business impact of what to us is simply a job failure. The learning point is that a key part of the role of the SLM is to understand IT services from a customer as well as an IT perspective. Examples like this serve to show that there can be serious disconnects between the two, and unless you understand your customer’s perspective, you can’t hope to build an effective relationship.
It is an old but nevertheless true saying that ‘Proper planning prevents poor performance.’ The effectiveness of your customer meetings is, without question, a function of the completeness of your preparation. Good practice is to prepare and distribute an agenda ahead of the meeting, making sure that your customer has an opportunity to raise any specific agenda items of their own; this may influence who accompanies you to the meeting. It is also good practice to send a copy of the minutes of your previous meeting with the agenda.
Whether or not you send the actual performance reports to the customer before the meeting is questionable. My preference is to do so to allow your customer to review the results beforehand to make the most of the actual meeting time. If you choose this path, it is clearly essential that the reports are self-explanatory. We discussed the format of performance reports in ‘Measuring and reporting service performance’ in Chapter 5. Together with the charts and data tables, the key aspect of any report that makes it self-explanatory is the inclusion of a narrative to explain any unexpected variations or missed service levels.
Have a clear idea of what you want from the meeting in terms of outcomes. If there’s something specific, make sure that you have done all you can to give yourself the best chance of achieving your objectives.
Please also refer to ‘Managing customer review meetings’ in Chapter 5.
Customer meetings can be stressful but can also be the most satisfying part of the role. If you have properly and fully prepared for the meeting, it is an opportunity to understand what your customer thinks of the service they receive, and a chance to influence their perception positively and build an effective relationship based on trust.
Almost everything you do on a day-to-day basis should be focused on having successful discussions and meetings with your customers. Your customer’s opinion of IT will be significantly influenced by their perception of the value of these meetings.
Recognise when you attend the meetings that you are representing their supplier, and that their opinion of IT will be influenced not only by the quality of the service they receive and the extent to which their requirements are being met, but it will also be influenced by how they perceive you. Although this is an internal meeting, my advice is to approach it as professionally as you would if your customer worked for another organisation. In other words, apply all the normal protocols you would when trying to win their business: arrive on time, dress appropriately, make sure you know the names and roles of the people who will be at the meeting and ensure you take along sufficient printed copies of the agenda and reports. If you intend to use a projector and/or flip chart or whiteboard, make sure beforehand that these will be available and take your own set of marker pens along.
These are not just niceties but give your customers confidence that you know your job and take your responsibilities seriously. You might also consider using some classic relationship management techniques, such as keeping notes about the lives of your customers outside work, their families, hobbies and interests. Not only can this help build an effective relationship, it supports their perception that you are genuinely interested and care about them.
None of this may come naturally to you, but the opportunity to practice and enhance these techniques in a ‘friendly’ environment, that is, with people in the same organisation, will stand you in good stead for future roles that interface with representatives from other organisations.
Once you return to your desk, it is good practice to drop your customer a line to thank them for their time and summarise what you agreed at the meeting. If you took formal minutes, send these not only to your customer but also, as a matter of course, to anyone else referenced in the minutes as well as your manager. If there are any points about which you are unsure, there’s no reason why you can’t call or email your customer for clarification; better to be clear than to proceed on an invalid assumption.
You then need to decide which colleagues you need to engage to progress the action points assigned to you. If there is a timeline or deadline associated with these, good practice is to report progress and any issues before the deadline to keep your customer informed (it’s truly remarkable how some service provider representatives keep bad news to themselves and fail to manage their customer’s expectations, and then wonder why meetings are adversarial!).
The ability to ‘influence without authority’ is a key skill necessary for the SLM (more on this in the next chapter). Your ability to do this successfully is a critical attribute of the role since, unless you are very senior within IT, there is little, if anything, you will have the authority to agree with your customers on behalf of IT. Instead you are in some ways acting as a go-between or message carrier. Even if you are a subject matter expert in the relevant field, it does not give you the required authority, although it may help you to strengthen the business case for a path of action.
To be successful requires a combination of understanding and practice. Given that someone outside your sphere of authority is not obliged to respond to your requests and can undoubtedly come up with many reasons why they can’t or won’t do so, how can you enlist their support and commitment?
One of the most effective ways I have found of winning people over while recognising their pressures and objectives is to discuss with them the wider department’s objectives and the responsibilities you all share for making your department successful. Less subtly, you can engage their manager to win that person’s mandate for their colleague’s support.
In summary, a typical day in the life of an SLM is focused on recognising, meeting, reporting and improving on the service provider’s ability to meet the negotiated service levels.
This is probably the most important aspect of IT service provision, because the services and associated service levels represent the essence of what your customers need from IT and therefore the focus of everything that IT does. On a daily basis, you should therefore ensure that your colleagues recognise and support service level management and use it as the basis of CSI.