Daniel C.

Lafever Alverno Information Services

Eight Wastes at the Service Desk

Your keys to f inding opportunities for support center improvement

Eight Wastes at the Service Desk

Your keys to finding opportunities for support center improvements.

"It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory." William Deming, father of the quality evolution
In the current economic climate, organizations have begun to examine the inefficient and redundant processes in their operations. Failure to reduce waste makes profitability for the enterprise even harder during tough times. While cash may be king, the enemies of successful businesses are non-value added services and unproductive activities. Do you know where the waste is in your service desk? Do your support center employees know where to look to improve processes? In the brave new world of ITIL V3, continuous service improvement touches every aspect of the service lifecycle. Identifying the non-value added processes in your service desk can be a first step in embracing continuous improvement. Once you have done so, there are many tools or methods such as Plan-Do-Check-Act, Lean, Six Sigma, Quick and Easy Kaizen, and others that one can use to drive out improvements. However, the question remains: where do you start? Decades ago, Toyotas Chief Engineer, Taiichi Ohno, discovered that eliminating waste was a key to improving quality and efficiency in manufacturing. The elimination of the seven wastes became an integral part of the Toyota production system which produces high quality cars that have come to dominate world automobile markets. Can we apply the same techniques at the service desk and discover those inefficient and costly wastes that add no value? Using the seven wastes plus one model, lets examine the areas of lost productivity in the support center.

Waste #1: Unnecessary Transport moving products around without adding value.
A good example of this waste is when you move around items over and over again within a storage area. At the service desk, unnecessary movement wastes valuable time, slows resolution, and frustrates callers. Consider the following unnecessary transports: Moving a service tickets from team to team before it reaches the correct destination IVR and phone tree menus that customers must navigate through before arriving at the correct queue Transferring customer calls from one place to another without resolution Too many mouse clicks to self-service or self-help

Waste #2: Too much inventory

This waste in occurs in information technology because the inventory of the service desk is not easily seen. Employees can spend a great deal of time simply trying to manage too many calls and open tickets. Another example is when an agent has to navigate a support knowledgebase with redundant articles. Support centers can be overwhelmed with virtual inventories in these areas: Calls holding in queue

Backlog of open tickets Unnecessary tickets opened by customers Obsolete or incorrect knowledgebase solutions

Waste #3: Excessive motions employees searching and looking for things.
If you have ever been in a grocery store after an aisle remodel, your search times often increase greatly because everything you buy has moved to a new location. Because so many grocery items are in new locations, it can you take several trips down an aisle before you learn where everything is. In the same way, agents can move all over the network and the internet looking for the right link to click or scanning a database to find the correct information, often to no avail. Other wastes of motion include: Searching for information that is required to create tickets Opening and closing screens and minimizing and maximizing windows on the desktop Searching for solutions and assistance from various communication tools such as email, instant messaging, blogs, and other means

Waste #4: Waiting time to elapse for the next process step.
Troubleshooting steps that require the actions of a customer can greatly increase time to resolution. Since most callers are not experts in IT, time is lost when users are unable or unwilling to perform system tasks to restore service. There are other waiting delays that generate waste such as these: Agents placing customers on hold Customer placing agents on hold Customer waiting in queue for the next agent Slow system response times

Waste #5: Overproduction manufacturing a product before its needed.

Most clothing stores dont need swimsuits for the winter season, because there is no demand. Likewise, the service desk can produce services that are costly yet not needed by the customer. Examples: Overstaffing of agents when the call volume is low Excessive knowledgebase articles prior to system implementation Multiple tickets for the same problem

Waste #6: Over processing of parts

A good illustration of over processing is the number of times that some packages are wrapped in plastic. The excessive use of shrink wrapping adds cost and, in some cases, reduces customer satisfaction because it requires too much time and effort to remove. Over processing IT service requests is costly, adds wait times, and will degrade the customer experience. Service desk over processing occurs in these instances: Excessive routing of tickets among teams and individuals Confirming information from the customer before its needed Redundant troubleshooting steps Escalation of ticket to the wrong team Unnecessary ticket escalation

Waste #7: Defects defective parts.

During the summer of 1985 the Yugo automobile went on sale as the cheapest car sold in the USA. Many owners complained of problems including engine failure, poor shifter and transmission, and terrible dealer service. By 1989, Yugo America went bankrupt. Defects will occur in products because quality is not built into the manufacturing process. In the same way, defects in service support are a result of poor practices, errors in call handling, inefficient processes, and incomplete agent training. A short list of service desk defects is: Abandoned calls Incorrect ticket information Obsolete or erroneous knowledgebase information Mis-routed tickets or logs Incorrect identification and diagnosis of incidents Reopened tickets

Waste #8: Employees Underutilized people.

This waste is probably the least understood and recognized in the marketplace today. One of the pillars of the Toyota production system is respect for people. If employees are not developed, their talents and strengths not used, their ideas not harvested, then the entire enterprise is at risk for missing great opportunities. In some organizations, front line service desk employees are not viewed as highly as other so-called experts in IT. This creates tension among groups of workers and reduces overall productivity. Failures of fully utilizing the human potential of support center employees include:

Lack of engaging all employees in the improvement process Not recognizing that service desk staff are experts at their jobs Lack of training and investment in people Failure to use employee talents and strengths

Using the Eight Wastes as a starting point, service desk staff and management can explore the areas that have the most pain to both agents and the customers. The discovery of inefficient processes and superfluous agent work will reveal many opportunities within business services to improve IT support. Before spending a great deal of precious capital to implement the latest service desk technology, consider identifying the inefficient, broken, and non-value added processes first; then improve or eliminate them. Waste is a terrible thing to mind.