Providing Affordable IT Management to SME's The Service review - part 1
Dependent on the size of your business, the size of your suppliers and the criticality of your systems, at some point you may want to start to undertake service reviews. Normally these are face to face meetings with the key supplier but based on the factors above you may want to start by holding internal service reviews where you start to “go through the motions” until you are comfortable bringing the supplier into it.
So first of all what are we going to cover in this run of topics?
1) The purpose of the service review
2) The service review life cycle
3) The proposed frequency of service reviews
4) Segregating your supplier based upon importance
5) Performing the service review including key documents
So we will start this chapter off by asking the question “what is the purpose of the service review” ? Well if we look at the underlying principles of good service management:
1) Clearly understood and defined services
2) Continual focus on maintaining and improving service availability
3) Ensuring best value delivery
...the service review is really a mixture of the “enabler” and the “reviewer” of these principles. Lets look at that in a little more detail.
Why the enabler? Well suppliers being suppliers, they tend to be passive and the less you see them the more they are getting out of their charges without having to expend any effort. Cynical ? a little maybe but based on a law of averages of my experience a fair statement. A good supplier will engage you with regular reports, maybe a “face” for you to liaise with and a method of meeting up. Unfortunately a larger amount will keep their distance with the only real contact coming from the sales team and not the service team! So by ensuring that a service review takes place you get to talk about your “current” service and to maintain the focus on ensuring what you are paying for is being delivered. This is where the “review” part of it comes in, as a good service review is about understanding what you should be getting and comparing it with what you have received. If its not up to the mark, then actions to bring it in line should be agreed. If it’s OK, then that’s great but what about the “Service Improvement Program”. How is the supplier going to wow you even further to give your business the competitive edge. Next time we will look at this topic in a little more detail…
3rd Jan 2010
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