Providing Affordable IT Management to SME's The expanded incident lifecycle part 3
During this article, we are going to look at the two components of the expanded incident lifecycle that you can not directly influence. These are the “response” time and the “repair” time (sometimes called the “fix” time). Now these are really influenced by your “doer’s” which will probably fall into one of three camps:
1) External Third Parties
2) Internal Technical Resolvers
3) Internal “Mr Fix it’s”
The first one is quite straight forward as these are any technical support providers that lie outside of your organisation. These could be formal contract for a piece of application software negotiated specifically for your organisation or more general contracts such as with your broadband provider which tend to be a “on size fits all” agreement With regard to the second two categories, the main differentiation here is whether it is part of the persons day to day job (bullet 2) or whether that have a day job in your organisation and just happen to be know as the person who knows a bit about “system x” (bullet 3).
Regardless of which camp they fall into, the first step is to document the the services they support and make a record of the response and fix times they quote. For your third parties, this may mean getting out support contracts or contacting their helpdesk / customer service line. For your internal resolvers you will probably not have agreements, so your starting point may be to document what is achievable. You may find yourself in a situation where some services have gaps (ie no information) or the information you are provided with is not acceptable (eg BT may quote a fix time for a residential broadband line as 4 days – for a home based business dependant on email as a sales confirmation tool, this may not be acceptable?)
Now this is where we get into one of those ITIL crossover points as availability management is starting to touch on service level management….. To shorten your incident lifecycle with your third parties, you may need to review your suppliers or renegotiate you response and fix times. Alternatively you might want to review the recent times you have had to call on their services and review their actual performance against their quoted figures. When renegotiating, you will have to consider the cost vs service factor. You may be able to get the response time down from 4 hr to 30 minutes but at what cost increase? For your internal resolvers it can be much more simple as the constraint is usually workload priority.
You may want to consider a “trial” improvement on the current response / fix times where the new metrics are worked to on a “best endevours” basis but are not binding. Once the impact on their day job is identified, a more formal agreement could be considered.
16th Oct 2009