The underside

So, I left service management in August of 2014 so that I could get some education on out-sourced IT, which is what I was a managing as a service delivery manager. I kept coming up against problems that I could not break in the organization, and the time I spent in in-sourced IT and service management did not equip me to fully comprehend the problems, or the reports of what my functional subordinates had been telling me.

Let me tell you, it's pretty ugly on the underside of service management. Not everything is bad and there are some people who do it well so I can see how it was all supposed to work from all sides except the customer's (I'll get there eventually), but what has been going on in the industry has gutted the structure that enabled service delivery to function. Service Delivery is no longer allowed by higher level management to do what it was intended to do: provide better service to customers.

One of the shortcomings that I have discovered is that executive management has lost sight of its services. It has been infected with a common Wall-Street disease, which is flopping financial gains with quality: instead of producing a high quality service from which money flows naturally, the goal has been to make money from from the service at the cost of quality. And this seems to be endemic - every group with whom I has spoken in the last 18 months from every company is dealing with this.

The problem is simple, and something I learned very early on in my MBA. Financial indicators are lagging indicators: they tell you about performance between 1 and 6 months ago, but they are not indicators of today's performance. You find that out next month or next quarter from accounting.

What can tell you how you're doing today is your services and marketing teams and metrics: are your services hitting their targets, and are the customers pleased with the service they are receiving compared to what they signed up for. These directly correlate to financial numbers, but this is not what modern public company executives want: they want the quarter-end shareholder report to be good so they get their bonuses.

Symptoms range from not having enough people to deliver service, to sales teams selling something that the company cannot do, to massive attrition rates (regardless of gepgraphy), to loss of company knowledge required to turn the massive handles of internal process and bureaucracy.

These are not the root problem. They are symptoms. They root problem is much simpler: the ability to make decisions for long term gain has been sacrificed to short term earnings reports. This has only happened in the past few decades, from what I can tell. In the '80s companies were still on the service path, but the shift to short-term thinking was just beginning to make cracks in the quality service that is the core of successful services businesses. It's taken 2-3 decades to bring us here.

These problems have caused the underside of service management to become the ugly, top-heavy thing that it is in most organizations today. It's not beyond repair, but significant changes will have to be made to many areas in order for it to recover. It is possible for a single, charismatic leader with lots of support to change it for one organization even now, but the inherent system weaknesses we have created make that very difficult for everyone else.

Stay interested over the tedium by doing something extra

  Sometimes, the day-to-day job of Service Delivery Management can become a bit tedious, and even depressing.  The worst thing that you can do is to allow yourself to be drawn in to that tedium and to become dissatisfied with your job and to give up the passion you have for your work.  Unfortunately, Service Delivery just has parts that are like that and there's really no way to avoid them.  How then do you keep from losing your passion?

  Find something else to do at work that you get enjoyment from.  I have found that volunteering for small projects working on things that I love have helped me to keep my interest at work.  While there are many tedious things about my current job, I have found that these little projects have helped to bring my passion back even with the tedious things that I do every day.  

  For example, I'm working on a small documentation project, volunteering to help with some open-source items, and helping to run a small PoC with my systems administrations skills.  These things only take maybe an hour or so a week.  But after doing a bit of work on them at the end of a really frustrating day or at the beginning of a really nasty day helps to restore the passion that I have that is one of my strong attributes so that I can bring that passion back and overcome the other things that have sapped my strength.

  Find what it is that you can do at work that will restore your passion - it's amazing how a little bit of volunteering will bring your spirit back for you.

The Organizational Discipline of Prioritization

I've had a lot of experience and discussions around prioritization of work with both internal and external customers.  I've also been on the delivery end working down a priority list.  The one refrain I've heard over and over from customers is very simple: "why should we have to?"

Giving priority is a biological imperative, and an organizational one.  It is required by scarcity, which all things deal with sooner or later.  Who gets food, who gets water - in nature the strongest or the cleverest receive priority. We recognize this as "natural selection."

However, in organizations, be it the cells of a body, a family, or a company, priority is given internal to the organization based on the system priorities.  A mother gives priority to children, so when food is short, the mother feeds them first.  When your body is cold, your extremities lose priority over the vital organs and your body diverts blood flow away from the limbs.  Systems like the human body prioritize constantly in hundreds of ways in order to keep balance and to keep health.

For any person who has a goal, they must constantly prioritize what opportunities that they take in order to reach their goals in life.  Every mentor I have ever had has explained that I need to choose the opportunities I take, even down to which chores that I do first in my house.  The people who never prioritize tend to be arrogant and spoiled, and when real life hits them they collapse under its weight.

This same thing applies to organizations and the work that they want done.  Organizations must prioritize in order to reach their goals.  It is a discipline, make no mistake, and it is not easy to do, and distributing the priorities of your organization so that what is truly important goes first.  I have experienced conflicting priorities because organizations units are pulling against each other and no one breaks the tie.  That sort of friction, if endemic, is a symptom of a greater organizational problem showing that the organization is not pulling together instead it is pulling apart.

  What can be done to prevent this?  Priority setting must be a habit.  The priorities must be set by the leadership and then transferred to the organization in language that each unit can understand - so that each member can follow those priorities.

Now, how does this affect work that comes to a service delivery manager?  It should follow that all work submitted follows the priorities of the organization, and that those requests are ordered to meet them.  The only way to ensure that is for work to arrive in a queue that is ordered to ensure that it is met.

Dealing with Third Party vendors

Some advice when dealing with third party suppliers - figure out who you are working with.  If your contacts are honest, treat them well and they will treat you well.  If they aren't honest, nail them down and change them out for someone who is.  Sticking with a dishonest supplier is likely to cause issues, but realize that the problem might just be your contact and not the supplier

How do you deal with an honest supplier? 

First advice is the old saying, "good fences make good neighbors".  If you want to keep the relationship clean, you need to set and agree where the bounds of responsibilities are.  One of the worst things to your relationship will be having an issue where the responsibilities are unclear between you and then, and you both wind up distrusting the other person because you think the other is trying to pull a fast one or refuses to do their job.

Second advice, when you are in hard times with them, it helps to have contact outside of work.  Going to the pub, having coffee, the occasional meal is good to have so that you can let off steam and clarify things where you aren't being watched, recorded, or your job is not on the line.  If you want to navigate the business hurdles, it helps for you to have a friend in your contact on the other side of the business, and in unofficial capacities they will be able to explain the difficulties in ways that you do not.  This can be helpful when working through issues where responsibilities aren't clear.

Third advice: treat the supplier with respect.  If you cease to show them respect, you will lose their trust and their willingness to help you out where there is ambiguity will vanish.  That helpfulness is one of the most valuable items you can have in a supplier because it helps you to succeed where there are exceptions in your business.

What do you do with a dishonest supplier?  Get your contracts and legal departments to nail down the suppliers agreements in detail, and then hold them to it ruthlessly.  That is the only way to get someone dishonest to deliver - make it harder and more painful to be dishonest than it is to deliver on the agreements.  On the side, work to change out the supplier or the contacts if you know that it is your interface and not the company itself - it's wise to be honest with the suppliers management and explain to them what you are finding in your contacts and give them a chance to resolve the issue before removing them, because it's generally expensive to change out suppliers mid-agreement.

Managing upwards on critical issues

When you're facing critical issues that you cannot solve at your level and you need executive help, here's something that you can do to make things easier. Write up a executive summary. The hardest thing about this at the service delivery management level is that we tend to get sucked into the details and the executive summary requires you to pull yourself out of the details.

I have done this on several occasions, and even when I tried to bring it out of the weeds of the details, I still very rarely make it quite to the level that the execs need. I find I have done the best when I go out and eat a long lunch before I write it, so that my head is clear - never write it when you are in the middle of a crisis, that never helps.

Then, put the issue in financial terms - executives understand it that way.

Then, think of the 3 - 100,000'-view problems that you are facing.

Then think of the items you need to solve each of those very high level issues and write them on the third page.

Last, reinforce the consequence of not acting.

Send your note to your manager, their manager, and the executives you from which you need help.

Then setup a meeting with those you sent the pack through so that you can walk them through it and let them ask questions.

At the worst case, if you are ignored and have done all that you can do, then you have converted yourself if no one listens to what you have been trying to tell them. When your service fails, you can show that you did everything in your power to solve the issues and escalated properly.

Impossible circumstances

I think at least once along your journey in service delivery, you will face a circumstance where you have been committed to deliver something that the organization you own cannot deliver what has been agreed. It may have been your predecessor, your boss, your CEO, or even you. Depending on the magnitude of what you cannot deliver, it is, of course more or less important to the actual service, but it is never a position you want to be in. Do your best to make sure that you can deliver what you say you will deliver, but even your best efforts may not be enough if it is outside of your control. If it is in your control, obviously fix it as soon as possible. But sometimes you can't fix the problem.

What is the best way to deal with circumstances that make your team unable to deliver your services to the full extent of your agreement in some way that is non-trivial? It is part negotiations, part CYA, and part risk management. Here's what you need to do:

If you made the agreement, then go to your superiors and explain what has happened in clear detail - it is always better to be open and honest up-front than not to be. It may have an impact on your job in the short term, but being honest can often make up for it in the long run because your superiors will learn that you would not try to hide the truth and that you own up to your mistakes, which is valuable in the business world even if most people would not admit it for fear of consequences. It will make them more willing to trust you than if they have to investigate it themselves.

Next, no matter whose agreement it was (from your boss to the legal department contracts people), you need to document four things: what caused the inability to deliver the service, what impact this means to the quality of the service, what solutions you have with estimated costs, and the financial impact of this issue. Let's step through these:

1. Cause
The cause of the issue needs to be identified. Make sure you complete this part as objectively and unemotionally as you can. By the time you have been berated by your customers for the issues arising, which is usually when these items are found, it can be very hard to do so, but it is very important that no one can deflect ownership of the problem merely because you lost your temper or they may decide to ignore you because "it's just another flare up, they will get over it in a few days."

2. Result
Make sure the actual impact to your services is clearly stated. It's includes things such as "we cannot afford to renew the support contract and will be unable to obtain vendor fixes for issues we encounter" or "there are no longer enough staff to support a 24x7 service line as has been committed to our business units." It could also be the inability to meet your SLA timeframes - outsourcing contracts seem to include these more often, and often these have financial penalties written into the contract documents themselves (no matter how wise that might be until a service has been defined, built, tested, and then baselined.)

3. Recommendations
If the only thing you take to your boss is the complaint, then you will be labelled negatively in the future for such issues you identify. Turn this as positively as you can. If you have a solution or three ready, then you are giving your superiors the opportunity to decide what needs to be done and your value in their estimation will go up, even if they have another idea to resolve it. It shows that you truly own your services when you go the extra length to think of how to resolve the issue. Maybe you recommend renegotiation, or you think that bringing in someone to help improve the process will help, or a new tool to automate something. Maybe you might even recommend exiting the agreement as it sits, if the issue is bad enough. Include anything you can on cost of the solutions, as well, as that is what executives need to know, even if it is only indicative.

4. Finances
Why the financial part? Well, unless is is your own company, most upper level management think entirely in currency. You have to translate the problem into their language so that they can understand or they would not know how to understand the impact and criticality, and they will ignore it. And the most effective way to communicate in any business today is to explain, "This is going to cost us the $75 million renewal contract planned in 6 months" or "We will be paying a penalty of $20,000 every contract cycle because of this." Your boss will then be able to compare this cost to the cost of any solutions in determining which one makes the most business sense.

5. Simplify
Make sure you write an executive summary on the first line of your documentation, just in case even higher level management than your boss needs to be involved, and it never hurts to have an introduction.

Now that you have this done, whether in several discussions or via letter or email, you need to make sure you have the documentation done. Ensure that your boss receives a copy of this and make sure you obtain confirmation of receipt - positive confirmation where you boss acknowledges receipt is much better than anything else.

If your boss would not respond, send it to his boss. Remember your target audience and maybe rewrite the report a little better. Also, make sure you register this issue in your company's internal risk management system so that there is a place for everyone to see it in your organization in case there is an issue or you are unavailable.

Lastly, file these artifacts away. If the worst comes to the worst, you need to have it to prove that you were not derelict in your responsibilities as a service delivery manager. It's not pleasant, but it is something you have to do to ensure you can prove you both did your job and let the appropriate people knew of the impending issues in order to save your reputation and job in the worst circumstances. At the least, it allows you to prove that you take a proactive stance in managing your issues when it comes time for you to apply internally for a new job.

What do you do when the customer comes back? The best thing to do, if you have informed your boss and given them time to consider instead of stalling for them is to ask your customer to escalate this to your boss so that they can have the discussion. Don't do this for lots of little things, but sometimes it helps your boss to understand the impact after the customer has spoken directly to them about the issues. Be careful what you say when telling your customer to escalate - give your boss the opportunity to hear and understand without biasing your customers upfront, and they might even help to impress the urgency of the issues and the criticality of a fix being put in place for you.

Artifacts and agreements

As a service delivery manager, you have a relationship with your customers. That relationship will give you the ability to work through issues with your customer in a constructive way, and the better your relationship, the better off you will be. This is a good thing! It is part and parcel of the job that you have managing service delivery.

However, there is an old saying back where I come from: "Good fences make good neighbors." What this means is that agreements with strong boundary lines that are clearly and properly (and legally!) defined are key to a good relationship. Without those "fences" being drawn, where people can always see them, nobody knows what is owned by whom. So, it is always good to have those agreements.

However, there is one more critical thing that you have to do whenever you make an agreement - make sure you have an artifact from that person in that role specifying the agreement. That artifact is one of your "fence" posts with which you define what is in your scope and what is not.

Why is this so important? Well, think about it this way - suppose you and a neighbor have a long argument about where your property lines lie. Let's say that after 6 months you argue it out finally and agree where the boundaries actually are. You know where they are and your neighbor knows, but you never mark it down or document where that agreement is? What happens when your neighbor moves and you get a new neighbor?

Your argument will start all over again! And all that time will be wasted.

Today, people change roles more often than they tend to change property, so you need to get that artifact before your counterpart moves on - unless that happens, and if you happen to get someone who is disagreeable to your previous arrangement and would not take it on your word that this was the previous agreement, then get it in writing! That way you have that fence down and marked so no one has any confusion and they cannot argue out of the agreement at a later date just because they might be feeling cranky.

Note, sometimes, you may need to do the same thing from those whom you are over as well. Your own employees may forget that they agreed to work a certain way, and without that artifact from them you will have no leverage to push them back if they forget or are replaced.