5 Steps To Create A Proactive IT Organization

Host of IT organizations are reactive. Result is that most of the resources, including the critical ones, are always involved in fire fighting. This leads to:

•          Increased support cost
•          Poor CSAT
•          Customer attrition
•          Poor staff morale and satisfaction
•          Staff attrition

Management always talks about pro-activeness, but in a majority of organizations that I have come across, I felt that such 'commitment' was only vocal or only when there has been a severe customer escalation.

Employees have a feeling 'Proactive...Huh!!!'

The definite requirement for even thinking about creating a proactive IT organization is MANAGEMENT COMMITMENT...a real commitment and not simply a vocal one.

Now a question arises - "Got Management Commitment. Now WHAT???"

Following steps would help you turn your reactive IT organization into a proactive one:

Step 1: Implement Pro-active Problem Management

An effective problem management will ensure that similar incidents are eliminated or at worst minimized. Techniques like Pareto Analysis, Fishbone Analysis, 5 Why, Kepner Tregoe, FMEA and Fault Tree Analysis help in driving Problem Management. While analyzing the trends, a problem manager has to ensure analysis of the following data:

(a) Incident data: To identify incidents that could possibly be because of a problem associated with one of the parent CIs, or identifying trends which could possibly be pointing to a potential problem.

(b) Event data: To analyze event trends that could be pointing to a potential problem.

(c) CI status: To analyze CIs those have undergone frequent maintenance. They can point to a potential problem.

Step 2: Fortify Event Management

If event management is not implemented, then the first activity here would be to implement the same. Subsequently we need to fortify event management through intelligent ticketing. This would drive organization towards proactive incident management where a potential incident is identified and resolved even before it occurs.

Step 3: Implement Preventive Problem Management

A highly matured proactive problem management is towards preventing the problem itself and this is what I refer to as Preventive Problem Management. Ascertain that problem manager has a key role in CAB and that he/she ensures that a change is assessed not only for success of the release but also for potential incidents or problems that the release might lead to. Thereafter, approve changes only when such incidents or problems are eliminated from the release or in worst case resolution identified and KEDB updated.

Step 4: Implement Capacity Management

If capacity is not effectively and pro-actively managed it not only has an impact in terms of inadequate (more or less) capacity but even leads to incidents and problems (in cases where capacity is less). An effective capacity management contributes a lot towards a proactive IT organization and eliminating capacity related downtime.

Step 5: Implement Availability Management

Does meeting your incident SLA mean that your availability SLA is met? No. Not at all!!! Even if you have met your entire incident SLAs, there is likelihood with a high probability that your availability SLA is breached and this probability is near to one for a reactive organization. To minimize or make this probability zero, you need to drive your organization towards pro-activeness and availability management is a key process here. Implementing this process would ensure that your services are designed to provide the committed availability levels and your organization starts to work proactively in this direction.