Position and Agree on ROI to Maximize the Impact of Data and Analytics

Data and analytics ROI strategy is based on the business problem being solved and agreed-upon value being generated.

Analyst Perspective

Missing out on a significant opportunity for returns could be the biggest cost to the project and its sponsor.

		This research is directed to the key decision makers tasked with addressing business problems. It also informs stakeholders that have any interest in ROI, especially when applying it to a data and analytics platform and practice. While organizations typically use ROI to measure the performance of their investments, the key to determining what investment makes sense is opportunity cost. Missing out on a significant opportunity for return could be the biggest cost to the project and its sponsor. By making sure you appropriately estimate costs and value returned for all data and analytics activities, you can prioritize the ones that bring in the greatest returns.
Ibrahim Abdel-Kader Research Analyst, Data & Analytics Practice Info-Tech Research Group	Ben Abrishami-Shirazi Technical Counselor Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary – ROI on Data and Analytics

Info-Tech Insight

ROI doesn’t have to be perfect. Parameters and measures of success need to be agreed upon with the key decision makers.

Glossary

Return on Investment (ROI): A financial term used to determine how much value has been or will be gained or lost based on the total cost of investment. It is typically expressed as a percentage and is supported by the following formula:

Payback: How quickly money is paid back (or returned) on the initial investment.
Business Problem Owner (BPO): A leader in the organization who is accountable and is the key decision maker tasked with addressing a business problem through a series of investments. BPOs may use ROI as a reference for how their financial investments have performed and to influence future investment decisions.
Problem Solver: A key stakeholder tasked with collaborating with the BPO in addressing the business problem at hand. One of the problem solver’s responsibilities is to ensure that there is an improved return on the BPO’s investments.
Return Enhancers: A category for capabilities that directly or indirectly enhance the return of an investment.
Cost Savers: A category for capabilities that directly or indirectly save costs in relation of an investment.
Investment Opportunity Enablers: A category for capabilities that create or enable a new investment opportunity that may yield a potential return.
Game Changing Components: The components of a capability that directly yield value in solving a business problem.

ROI strategy on data and analytics

ROI roles

Typical roles involved in the ROI strategy across the organization

CDOs and CAOs typically have their budget allocated from both IT and business units.

This is evidenced by the “State of the CIO Survey 2023” reporting that up to 63% of CDOs and CAOs have some budget allocated from within IT; therefore, up to 37% of budgets are entirely funded by business executives.

This signifies the need to be aligned with peer executives and to use mechanisms like ROI to maximize the performance of investments.

Source: Foundry, “State of the CIO Survey 2023.”

Create a Service Management Roadmap

Implement service management in an order that makes sense.

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

"More than 80% of the larger enterprises we’ve worked with start out wanting to develop advanced service management practices without having the cultural and organizational basics or foundational practices fully in place. Although you wouldn’t think this would be the case in large enterprises, again and again IT leaders are underestimating the importance of cultural and foundational aspects such as governance, management practices, and understanding business value. You must have these fundamentals right before moving on."

Tony Denford,

Research Director – CIO

Info-Tech Research Group

Our understanding of the problem

This Research Is Designed For:

• CIO
• Senior IT Management

This Research Will Help You:

• Create or maintain service management (SM) practices to ensure user-facing services are delivered seamlessly to business users with minimum interruption.
• Increase the level of reliability and availability of the services provided to the business and improve the relationship and communication between IT and the business.

This Research Will Also Assist

• Service Management Process Owners

This Research Will Help Them:

• Formalize, standardize, and improve the maturity of service management practices.
• Identify new service management initiatives to move IT to the next level of service management maturity.

Executive summary

Situation

• Inconsistent adoption of holistic practices has led to a chaotic service delivery model that results in poor customer satisfaction.
• There is little structure, formalization, or standardization in the way IT services are designed and managed, leading to diminishing service quality and low business satisfaction.

Complication

• IT organizations want to be seen as strategic partners, but they fail to address the cultural and organizational constraints.
• Without alignment with the business goals, services often fail to provide the expected value.
• Traditional service management approaches are not adaptable for new ways of working.

Resolution

• Follow Info-Tech’s methodology to create a service management roadmap that will help guide the optimization of your IT services and improve IT’s value to the business.
• The blueprint will help you right-size your roadmap to best suit your specific needs and goals and will provide structure, ownership, and direction for service management.
• This blueprint allows you to accurately identify the current state of service management at your organization. Customize the roadmap and create a plan to achieve your target service management state.

Info-Tech Insight

Having effective service management practices in place will allow you to pursue activities such as innovation and drive the business forward. Addressing foundational elements like business alignment and management practices will enable you to build effective core practices that deliver business value. Consistent leadership support and engagement is essential to allow practitioners to focus on delivering expected outcomes.

Poor service management manifests in many different pains across the organization

Immaturity in service management will not result in one pain – rather, it will create a chaotic environment for the entire organization, crippling IT’s ability to deliver and perform.

Low Service Management Maturity

These are some of the pains that can be attributed to poor service management practices.

• Frequent service-impacting incidents
• Low satisfaction with the service desk
• High % of failed deployments
• Frequent change-related incidents
• Frequent recurring incidents
• Inability to find root cause
• No communication with the business
• Frequent capacity-related incidents

And there are many more…

Mature service management practices are a necessity, not a nice-to-have

Immature service management practices are one of the biggest hurdles preventing IT from reaching its true potential.

In 2004, PwC published a report titled “IT Moves from Cost Center to Business Contributor.” However, the 2014-2015 CSC Global CIO Survey showed that a high percentage of IT is still considered a cost center.

And low maturity of service management practices is inhibiting activities such as agility, DevOps, digitalization, and innovation.

Source: CSC Global CIO Survey: 2014-2015 “CIOs Emerge as Disruptive Innovators”

39%: Resources are primarily focused on managing existing IT workloads and keeping the lights on.

31%: Too much time and too many resources are used to handle urgent incidents and problems.

There are many misconceptions about what service management is

Misconception #1: “Service management is a process”

Effective service management is a journey that encompasses a series of initiatives that improves the value of services delivered.

Misconception #2: “Service Management = Service Desk”

Service desk is the foundation, since it is the main end-user touch point, but service management is a set of people and processes required to deliver business-facing services.

Misconception #3: “Service management is about the ITSM tool”

The tool is part of the overall service management program, but the people and processes must be in place before implementing.

Misconception #4: “Service management development is one big initiative”

Service management development is a series of initiatives that takes into account an organization’s current state, maturity, capacities, and objectives.

Misconception #5: “Service management processes can be deployed in any order, assuming good planning and design”

A successful service management program takes into account the dependencies of processes.

Misconception #6: “Service management is resolving incidents and deploying changes”

Service management is about delivering high-value and high-quality services.

Misconception #7: “Service management is not the key determinant of success”

As an organization progresses on the service management journey, its ability to deliver high-value and high-quality services increases.

Misconception #8: “Resolving Incidents = Success”

Preventing incidents is the name of the game.

Misconception #9: “Service Management = Good Firefighter”

Service management is about understanding what’s going on with user-facing services and proactively improving service quality.

Misconception #10: “Service management is about IT and technical services (e.g. servers, network, database)”

Service management is about business/user-facing services and the value the services provide to the business.

Service management projects often don’t succeed because they are focused on process rather than outcomes

Service management projects tend to focus on implementing process without ensuring foundational elements of culture and management practices are strong enough to support the change.

1. Aligning your service management goals with your organizational objectives leads to better understanding of the expected outcomes.

Understand your customers and what they value, and design your practices to deliver this value.

2. IT does not know what order is best when implementing new practices or process improvements.

Don't run before you can walk. Fundamental practices must reach the maturity threshold before developing advanced practices. Implement continuous improvement on your existing processes so they continue to support new practices.

3. IT does not follow best practices when implementing a practice.

Our best-practice research is based on extensive experience working with clients through advisory calls and workshops.

Info-Tech can help you create a customized, low-effort, and high-value service management roadmap that will shore up any gaps, prove IT’s value, and achieve business satisfaction.

Info-Tech’s methodology will help you customize your roadmap so the journey is right for you

With Info-Tech, you will find out where you are, where you want to go, and how you will get there.

With our methodology, you can expect the following:

• Eliminate or reduce rework due to poor execution.
• Identify dependencies/prerequisites and ensure practices are deployed in the correct order, at the correct time, and by the right people.
• Engage all necessary resources to design and implement required processes.
• Assess current maturity and capabilities and design the roadmap with these factors in mind.

Doing it right the first time around

You will see these benefits at the end

✓ Increase the quality of services IT provides to the business.

✓ Increase business satisfaction through higher alignment of IT services.

✓ Lower cost to design, implement, and manage services.

✓ Better resource utilization, including staff, tools, and budget.

Focus on a strong foundation to build higher value service management practices

Info-Tech Insight

Focus on behaviors and expected outcomes before processes.

Foundational elements

• Operating model facilitates service management goals
• Culture of service delivery
• Governance discipline to evaluate, direct, and monitor
• Management discipline to deliver

Stabilize

• Deliver stable, reliable IT services to the business
• Respond to user requests quickly and efficiently
• Resolve user issues in a timely manner
• Deploy changes smoothly and successfully

Proactive

• Avoid/prevent service disruptions
• Improve quality of service (performance, availability, reliability)

Service Provider

• Understand business needs
• Ensure services are available
• Measure service performance, based on business-oriented metrics

Strategic Partner

• Fully aligned with business
• Drive innovation
• Drive measurable value

Info-Tech Insight

Continued leadership support of the foundational elements will allow delivery teams to provide value to the business. Set the expectation of the desired maturity level and allow teams to innovate.

Follow our model and get to your target state

Before moving to advanced service management practices, you must ensure that the foundational and core elements are robust enough to support them. Leadership must nurture these practices to ensure they are sustainable and can support higher value, more mature practices.

Each step along the way, Info-Tech has the tools to help you

Phase 1: Launch the Project

Assemble a team with the right talent and vision to increase the chances of project success.

Phase 2: Assess Current State

Understand where you are currently on the service management journey using the maturity assessment tool.

Phase 3: Build Roadmap

Based on the assessments, build a roadmap to address areas for improvement.

Phase 4: Build Communication slide

Based on the roadmap, define the current state, short- and long-term visions for each major improvement area.

Info-Tech Deliverables:

• Project Charter
• Assessment Tools
• Roadmap Template
• Communication Template

CIO call to action

Improving the maturity of the organization’s service management practice is a big commitment, and the project can only succeed with active support from senior leadership.

Ideally, the CIO should be the project sponsor, even the project leader. At a minimum, the CIO needs to perform the following activities:

1. Walk the talk – demonstrate personal commitment to the project and communicate the benefits of the service management journey to IT and the steering committee.

Improving or adopting any new practice is difficult, especially for a project of this size. Thus, the CIO needs to show visible support for this project through internal communication and dedicated resources to help complete this project.

2. Select a senior, capable, and results-driven project leader.

Most likely, the implementation of this project will be lengthy and technical in some nature. Therefore, the project leader must have a good understanding of the current IT structure, senior standing within the organization, and the relationship and power in place to propel people into action.

3. Help to define the target future state of IT’s service management.

Determine a realistic target state for the organization based on current capability and resource/budget restraints.

4. Conduct periodic follow-up meetings to keep track of progress.

Reinforce or re-emphasize the importance of this project to the organization through various communication channels if needed.

Stabilizing your environment is a must before establishing any more-mature processes

CASE STUDY

Industry: Manufacturing

Source: Engagement

Challenge

• The business landscape was rapidly changing for this manufacturer and they wanted to leverage potential cost savings from cloud-first initiatives and consolidate multiple, self-run service delivery teams that were geographically dispersed.

Solution

Original Plan

• Consolidate multiple service delivery teams worldwide and implement service portfolio management.

Revised Plan with Service Management Roadmap:

• Markets around the world had very different needs and there was little understanding of what customers value.
• There was also no understanding of what services were currently being offered within each geography.

Results

• Plan was adjusted to understand customer value and services offered.
• Services were then stabilized and standardized before consolidation.
• Team also focused on problem maturity and drove a continuous improvement culture and increasing transparency.

MORAL OF THE STORY:

Understanding the value of each service allowed the organization to focus effort on high-return activities rather than continuous fire fighting.

Understand the processes involved in the proactive phase

CASE STUDY

Industry: Manufacturing

Source: Engagement

Challenge

• Services were fairly stable, but there were significant recurring issues for certain services.
• The business was not satisfied with the service quality for certain services, due to periodic availability and reliability issues.
• Customer feedback for the service desk was generally good.

Solution

Original Plan

• Review all service desk and incident management processes to ensure that service issues were handled in an effective manner.

Revised Plan with Service Management Roadmap:

• Design and deploy a rigorous problem management process to determine the root cause of recurring issues.
• Monitor key services for events that may lead to a service outage.

Results

• Root cause of recurring issues was determined and fixes were deployed to resolve the underlying cause of the issues.
• Service quality improved dramatically, resulting in high customer satisfaction.

MORAL OF THE STORY:

Make sure that you understand which processes need to be reviewed in order to determine the cause for service instability. Focusing on the proactive processes was the right answer for this company.

Have the right culture and structure in place before you become a service provider

CASE STUDY

Industry: Healthcare

Source:Journal of American Medical Informatics Association

Challenge

• The IT organization wanted to build a service catalog to demonstrate the value of IT to the business.
• IT was organized in technology silos and focused on applications, not business services.
• IT services were not aligned with business activities.
• Relationships with the business were not well established.

Solution

Original Plan

• Create and publish a service catalog.

Revised Plan: with Service Management Roadmap:

• Establish relationships with key stakeholders in the business units.
• Understand how business activities interface with IT services.
• Lay the groundwork for the service catalog by defining services from the business perspective.

Results

• Strong relationships with the business units.
• Deep understanding of how business activities map to IT services.
• Service definitions that reflect how the business uses IT services.

MORAL OF THE STORY:

Before you build and publish a service catalog, make sure that you understand how the business is using the IT services that you provide.

Calculate the benefits of using Info-Tech’s methodology

To measure the value of developing your roadmap using the Info-Tech tools and methodology, you must calculate the effort saved by not having to develop the methods.

A. How much time will it take to develop an industry-best roadmap using Info-Tech methodology and tools?

Using Info-Tech’s tools and methodology you can accurately estimate the effort to develop a roadmap using industry-leading research into best practice.

B. What would be the effort to develop the insight, assess your team, and develop the roadmap?

This metric represents the time your team would take to be able to effectively assess themselves and develop a roadmap that will lead to service management excellence.

C. Cost & time saving through Info-Tech’s methodology

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

Guided Implementation

"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keeps us on track."

Workshop

"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

Consulting

"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

Create a Service Management Roadmap – project overview

Workshop overview

Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information

PHASE 1

Launch the Project

Launch the project

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Create a powerful, succinct mission statement based on your organization’s goals and objectives.
• Assemble a project team with representatives from all major IT teams.
• Determine project stakeholders and create a plan to convey the benefits of this project.
• Establish metrics to track the success of the project.

Step Insights

• The project leader should have a strong relationship with IT and business leaders to maximize the benefit of each initiative in the service management journey.
• The service management roadmap initiative will touch almost every part of the organization; therefore, it is important to have representation from all impacted stakeholders.
• The communication slide needs to include the organizational change impact of the roadmap initiatives.

Phase 1 outline

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

Use Info-Tech’s project charter to begin your initiative

1.1 Service Management Roadmap Project Charter

The Service Management Roadmap Project Charter is used to govern the initiative throughout the project. It provides the foundation for project communication and monitoring.

The template has been pre-populated with sample information appropriate for this project. Please review this sample text and change, add, or delete information as required.

The charter includes the following sections:

• Mission Statement
• Goals & Objectives
• Project Team
• Project Stakeholders
• Current State (from phases 2 & 3)
• Target State (from phases 2 & 3)
• Target State
• Metrics
• Sponsorship Signature

Use Info-Tech’s ready-to-use deliverable to customize your mission statement

Adapt and personalize Info-Tech’s Service Management Roadmap Mission Statement and Goals & Objectives below to suit your organization’s needs.

Goals & Objectives

• Create a plan for implementing service management initiatives that align with the overall goals/objectives for service management.
• Identify service management initiatives that must be implemented/improved in the short term before deploying more advanced initiatives.
• Determine the target state for each initiative based on current maturity and level of investment available.
• Identify service management initiatives and understand dependencies, prerequisites, and level of effort required to implement.
• Determine the sequence in which initiatives should be deployed.
• Create a detailed rollout plan that specifies initiatives, time frames, and owners.
• Engage the right teams and obtain their commitment throughout both the planning and assessment of roadmap initiatives.
• both the planning and assessment of roadmap initiatives. Obtain support for the completed roadmap from executive stakeholders.

Example Mission Statement

To help [Organization Name] develop a set of service management practices that will better address the overarching goals of the IT department.

To create a roadmap that sequences initiatives in a way that incorporates best practices and takes into consideration dependencies and prerequisites between service management practices.

To garner support from the right people and obtain executive buy-in for the roadmap.

Create a well-balanced project team

The project leader should be a member of your IT department’s senior executive team with goals and objectives that will be impacted by service management implementation. The project leader should possess the following characteristics:

Leader

• Influence and impact
• Comprehensive knowledge of IT and the organization
• Relationship with senior IT management
• Ability to get things done

Team Members

Identify

The project team members are the IT managers and directors whose day-to-day lives will be impacted by the service management roadmap and its implementation. The service management initiative will touch almost every IT staff member in the organization; therefore, it is important to have representatives from every single group, including those that are not mentioned. Some examples of individuals you should consider for your team:

• Service Delivery Managers
• Director/Manager of Applications
• Director/Manager of Infrastructure
• Director/Manager of Service Desk
• Business Relationship Managers
• Project Management Office

Engage & Communicate

You want to engage your project participants in the planning process as much as possible. They should be involved in the current-state assessment, the establishment of goals and objectives, and the development of your target state.

To sell this project, identify and articulate how this project and/or process will improve the quality of their job. For example, a formal incident management process will benefit people working at the service desk or on the applications or infrastructure teams. Helping them understand the gains will help to secure their support throughout the long implementation process by giving them a sense of ownership.

The project stakeholders should also be project team members

When managing stakeholders, it is important to help them understand their stake in the project as well as their own personal gain that will come out of this project.

For many of the stakeholders, they also play a critical role in the development of this project.

Role & Benefits

• CIO

The CIO should be actively involved in the planning stage to help determine current and target stage.

The CIO also needs to promote and sell the project to the IT team so they can understand that higher maturity of service management practices will allow IT to be seen as a partner to the business, giving IT a seat at the table during decision making.

• Service Delivery Managers/Process Owners

Service Delivery Managers are directly responsible for the quality and value of services provided to the business owners. Thus, the Service Delivery Managers have a very high stake in the project and should be considered for the role of project leader.

Service Delivery Managers need to work closely with the process owners of each service management process to ensure clear objectives are established and there is a common understanding of what needs to be achieved.

• IT Steering Committee

The Committee should be informed and periodically updated about the progress of the project.

• Manager/Director – Service Desk

The Manager of the Service Desk should participate closely in the development of fundamental service management processes, such as service desk, incident management, and problem management.

Having a more established process in place will create structure, governance, and reduce service desk staff headaches so they can handle requests or incidents more efficiently.

• Manager/Director –Applications & Infrastructure

The Manager of Applications and Infrastructure should be heavily relied on for their knowledge of how technology ties into the organization. They should be consulted regularly for each of the processes.

This project will also benefit them directly, such as improving the process to deploy a fix into the environment or manage the capacity of the infrastructure.

• Business Relationship Manager

As the IT organization moves up the maturity ladder, the Business Relationship Manager will play a fundamental role in the more advanced processes, such as business relationship management, demand management, and portfolio management.

This project will be an great opportunity for the Business Relationship Manager to demonstrate their value and their knowledge of how to align IT objectives with business vision.

Ensure you get the entire IT organization on board for the project with a well-practiced change message

Getting the IT team on board will greatly maximize the project’s chance of success.

One of the top challenges for organizations embarking on a service management journey is to manage the magnitude of the project. To ensure the message is not lost, communicate this roadmap in two steps.

1. Communicate the roadmap initiative

The most important message to send to the IT organization is that this project will benefit them directly. Articulate the pains that IT is currently experiencing and explain that through more mature service management, these pains can be greatly reduced and IT can start to earn a place at the table with the business.

2. Communicate the implementation of each process separately

The communication of process implementation should be done separately and at the beginning of each implementation. This is to ensure that IT staff do not feel overwhelmed or overloaded. It also helps to keep the project more manageable for the project team.

Continuously monitor feedback and address concerns throughout the entire process

• Host lunch and learns to provide updates on the service management initiative to the entire IT team.
• Understand if there are any major roadblocks and facilitate discussions on how to overcome them.

Articulate the service management initiative to the IT organization

Spread the word and bring attention to your change message through effective mediums and organizational changes.

Key aspects of a communication plan

The methods of communication (e.g. newsletters, email broadcast, news of the day, automated messages) notify users of implementation.

In addition, it is important to know who will deliver the message (delivery strategy). You need IT executives to deliver the message – work hard on obtaining their support as they are the ones communicating to their staff and should be your project champions.

Anticipate organizational changes

The implementation of the service management roadmap will most likely lead to organizational changes in terms of structure, roles, and responsibilities. Therefore, the team should be prepared to communicate the value that these changes will bring.

Communicating Change

• What is the change?
• Why are we doing it?
• How are we going to go about it?
• What are we trying to achieve?
• How often will we be updated?

The Qualities of Leadership: Leading Change

Create a project communication plan for your stakeholders

This project cannot be successfully completed without the support of senior IT management.

1. After the CIO has introduced this project through management meetings or informal conversation, find out how each IT leader feels about this project. You need to make sure the directors and managers of each IT team, especially the directors of application and infrastructure, are on board.
2. After the meeting, the project leader should seek out the major stakeholders (particularly the heads of applications and infrastructure) and validate their level of support through formal or informal meetings. Create a list documenting the major stakeholders, their level of support, and how the project team will work to gain their approval.
3. For each identified stakeholder, create a custom communication plan based on their role. For example, if the director of infrastructure is not a supporter, demonstrate how this project will enable them to better understand how to improve service quality. Provide periodic reporting or meetings to update the director on project progress.

INPUT

• A collaborative discussion between team members

OUTPUT

• Thorough briefing for project launch
• A committed team

Materials

• Communication message and plan
• Metric tracking

Participants

• Project leader
• Core project team

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

1.1

Create a powerful, succinct mission statement

Using Info-Tech’s sample mission statement as a guide, build your mission statement based on the objectives of this project and the benefits that this project will achieve. Keep the mission statement short and clear.

1.2

Assemble the project team

Create a project team with representatives from all major IT teams. Engage and communicate to the project team early and proactively.

1.3

Identify project stakeholders and create a communication plan

Info-Tech will help you identify key stakeholders who have a vested interest in the success of the project. Determine the communication message that will best gain their support.

1.4

Use metrics to track the success of the project

The onsite analyst will help the project team determine the appropriate metrics to measure the success of this project.

PHASE 2

Assess Your Current Service Management State

Assess your current state

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Use Info-Tech’s Service Management Maturity Assessment Tool to determine your overall practice maturity level.
• Understand your level of completeness for each individual practice.
• Understand the three major phases involved in the service management journey; know the symptoms of each phase and how they affect your target state selection.

Step Insights

• To determine the real maturity of your service management practices, you should focus on the results and output of the practice, rather than the activities performed for each process.
• Focus on phase-level maturity as opposed to the level of completeness for each individual process.

Phase 2 outline

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

Understand and assess impacting forces – constraints and enablers

Constraints and enablers are organizational and behavioral triggers that directly impact your ability and approach to establishing Service Management practices.

Effective service management requires a mix of different approaches and practices that best fit your organization. There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. Consider the resources, environment, emerging technologies, and management practices facing your organization. What items can you leverage or use to mitigate to move your service management program forward?

Use Info-Tech’s “Organizational Context” template to list the constraints and enablers affecting your service management

The Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template will help you understand the business environment you need to consider as you build out your roadmap.

Discuss and document constraints and enablers related to the business environment, available resources, management practices, and emerging technologies. Any constraints will need to be addressed within your roadmap and enablers should be leveraged to maximize your results.

Document constraints and enablers

1. Discuss and document the constrains and enablers for each aspect of the management mesh: environment, resources, management practices, or technology.
2. Use this as a thought provoker in later exercises.

INPUT

• A collaborative discussion

OUTPUT

• Organizational context constraints and enablers

Materials

• Whiteboards or flip charts

Participants

• All stakeholders

Build compelling vision and mission statements to set the direction of your service management program

While you are articulating the vision and mission, think about the values you want the team to display. Being explicit can be a powerful tool to create alignment.

A vision statement describes the intended state of your service management organization, expressed in the present tense.

A mission statement describes why your service management organization exists.

Your organizational values state how you will deliver services.

Use Info-Tech’s “Vision, Mission, and Values” template to set the aspiration & purpose of your service management practice

The Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template will help you document your vision for service management, the purpose of the program, and the values you want to see demonstrated.

If the team cannot gain agreement on their reason for being, it will be difficult to make traction on the roadmap items. A concise and compelling statement can set the direction for desired behavior and help team members align with the vision when trying to make ground-level decisions. It can also be used to hold each other accountable when undesirable behavior emerges. It should be revised from time to time, when the environment changes, but a well-written statement should stand the test of time.

Document your organization’s vision, mission , and values

1. Vision: Identify your desired target state, consider the details of that target state, and create a vision statement.
2. Mission: Consider the fundamental purpose of your SM program and craft a statement of purpose.
3. Values: As you work through the vision and mission, identify values that your organization prides itself in or has the aspiration for.
4. Discuss common themes and then develop a concise vision statement and mission statement that incorporates the group’s ideas.

INPUT

• A collaborative discussion

OUTPUT

• Vision statement
• Mission statement
• Organizational values

Materials

• Whiteboards or flip charts
• Sample vision and mission statements

Participants

• All stakeholders
• Senior leadership

Understanding attitude, behavior, and culture

Attitude

• What people think and feel. It can be seen in their demeanor and how they react to change initiatives, colleagues, and users.

Any form of organizational change involves adjusting people’s attitudes, creating buy-in and commitment. You need to identify and address attitudes that can lead to negative behaviors and actions or that are counter-productive. It must be made visible and related to your desired behavior.

Behaviour

• What people do. This is influenced by attitude and the culture of the organization.

To implement change within IT, especially at a tactical level, both IT and organizational behavior needs to change. This is relevant because people don’t like to change and will resist in an active or passive way unless you can sell the need, value, and benefit of changing their behavior.

Culture

• The accepted and understood ways of working in an organization. The values and standards that people find normal and what would be tacitly identified to new resources.

The organizational or corporate “attitude,” the impact on employee behavior and attitude is often not fully understood. Culture is an invisible element, which makes it difficult to identify, but it has a strong impact and must be addressed to successfully embed any organizational change or strategy.

Culture is a critical and under-addressed success factor

43% of CIOs cited resistance to change as the top impediment to a successful digital strategy.

CIO.com

75% of organizations cannot identify or articulate their culture or its impact.

Info-Tech

“Shortcomings in organizational culture are one of the main barriers to company success in the digital age.”

McKinsey – “Culture for a digital age”

Examples of how they apply

Attitude

• “I’ll believe that when I see it”
• Positive outlook on new ideas and changes

Behaviour

• Saying you’ll follow a new process but not doing so
• Choosing not to document a resolution approach or updating a knowledge article, despite being asked

Culture

• Hero culture (knowledge is power)
• Blame culture (finger pointing)
• Collaborative culture (people rally and work together)

Why have we failed to address attitude, behavior, and culture?

✓ While there is attention and better understanding of these areas, very little effort is made to actually solve these challenges.

✓ The impact is not well understood.

✓ The lack of tangible and visible factors makes it difficult to identify.

✓ There is a lack of proper guidance, leadership skills, and governance to address these in the right places.

✓ Addressing these issues has to be done proactively, with intent, rigor, and discipline, in order to be successful.

✓ We ignore it (head in the sand and hoping it will fix itself).

Avoidance has been a common strategy for addressing behavior and culture in organizations.

Use Info-Tech’s “Culture and Environment” template to identify cultural constraints that should be addressed in roadmap

The Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template will help you document attitude, behavior, and culture constraints.

Discuss as a team attitudes, behaviors, and cultural aspects that can either hinder or be leveraged to support your vision for the service management program. Capture all items that need to be addressed in the roadmap.

Document your organization’s attitudes, behaviors, and culture

1. Discuss and document positive and negative aspects of attitude, behavior, or culture within your organization.
2. Identify the items that need to be addressed as part of your roadmap.

INPUT

• A collaborative discussion

OUTPUT

• Culture and environment worksheet

Materials

• Whiteboards or flip charts

Participants

• All stakeholders

The relationship to governance

Attitude, behavior, and culture are still underestimated as core success factors in governance and management.

Behavior is a key enabler of good governance. Leading by example and modeling behavior has a cascading impact on shifting culture, reinforcing the importance of change through adherence.

Executive leadership and governing bodies must lead and support cultural change.

Key Points

• Less than 25% of organizations have formal IT governance in place (ITSM Tools).
• Governance tends to focus on risk and compliance (controls), but forgets the impact of value and performance.

Lack of oversight often limits the value of service management implementations

Organizations often fail to move beyond risk mitigation, losing focus of the goals of their service management practices and the capabilities required to produce value.

Risk Mitigation

• Stabilize IT
• Service Desk
• Incident Management
• Change Management

Gap

• Organizational alignment through governance
• Disciplined focus on goals of SM

Value Production

• Value that meets business and consumer needs

This creates a situation where service management activities and roadmaps focus on adjusting and tweaking process areas that no longer support how the organization needs to work.

How does establishing governance for service management provide value?

Governance of service management is a gap in most organizations, which leads to much of the failure and lack of value from service management processes and activities.

Once in place, effective governance enables success for organizations by:

1. Ensuring service management processes improve business value
2. Measuring and confirming the value of the service management investment
3. Driving a focus on outcome and impact instead of simply process adherence
4. Looking at the integrated impact of service management in order to ensure focused prioritization of work
5. Driving customer-experience focus within organizations
6. Ensuring quality is achieved and addressing quality impacts and dependencies between processes

Four common service management process ownership models

Your ownership structure largely defines how processes will need to be implemented, maintained, and improved. It has a strong impact on their ability to integrate and how other teams perceive their involvement.

Most organizations are somewhere within this spectrum of four core ownership models, usually having some combination of shared traits between the two models that are closest to them on the scale.

Info-Tech Insight

The organizational structure that is best for you depends on your needs, and one is not necessarily better than another. The next four slides describe when each ownership level is most appropriate.

Distributed process ownership

Distributed process ownership is usually evident when organizations initially establish their service management practices. The processes are assigned to a specific group, who assumes some level of ownership over its execution.

Info-Tech Insight

This model is often a suitable approach for initial implementations or where it may be difficult to move out of siloes within the organization’s structure or culture.

Centralized process ownership

Centralized process ownership usually becomes necessary for organizations as they move into a more functional structure. It starts to drive management of processes horizontally across the organization while still retaining functional management control.

Info-Tech Insight

This model is often suitable for maturing organizations that are starting to look at process integration and shared service outcomes and accountability.

Federated process ownership

Federated process ownership allows for global control and regional variation, and it supports product orientation and Agile/DevOps principles

Info-Tech Insight

Federated process ownership is usually evident in organizations that have an international or multi-regional presence.

Service management office (SMO)

SMO structures tend to occur in highly mature organizations, where service management responsibility is seen as an enterprise accountability.

Info-Tech Insight

SMOs are suitable for organizations with a defined IT and organizational strategy. A SMO supports integration with other enterprise practices like enterprise architecture and the PMO.

Determine which process ownership and governance model works best for your organization

The Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template will help you document process ownership and governance model

Example:

Key Goals:

☐ Own accountability for changes to core processes

☐ Understand systemic nature and dependencies related to processes and services

☐ Approve and prioritize improvement and CSI initiatives related to processes and services

☐ Evaluate success of initiative outcomes based on defined benefits and expectations

☐ Own Service Management and Governance processes and policies

☐ Report into ITSM executive or equivalent body

Membership:

☐ Process Owners, SM Owner, Tool Owner/Liaison, Audit

Discuss as a team which process ownership model works for your organization. Determine who will govern the service management practice. Determine items that should be identified in your roadmap to address governance and process ownership gaps.

Use Info-Tech’s “SWOT” template to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & threats that should be addressed

The Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template will help you document items from your SWOT analysis.

Brainstorm the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to resources, environment, technology, and management practices. Add items that need to be addressed to your roadmap.

Perform a SWOT analysis

1. Brainstorm each aspect of the SWOT with an emphasis on:

• Resources
• Environment
• Technologies
• Management Practices

INPUT

• A collaborative discussion

OUTPUT

• SWOT analysis
• Priority items identified

Materials

• Whiteboards or flip charts

Participants

• All stakeholders

Indicate desired maturity level for your service management program to be successful

Discuss the various maturity levels and choose a desired level that would meet business needs.

INPUT

• A collaborative discussion

OUTPUT

• Desired state of service management maturity

Materials

• None

Participants

• All stakeholders

Use Info-Tech’s Service Management Process Maturity Assessment Tool to understand your current state

The Service Management Process Maturity Assessment Tool will help you understand the true state of your service management.

Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 tabs

These three worksheets contain questions that will determine the overall maturity of your service management processes. There are multiple sections of questions focused on different processes. It is very important that you start from Part 1 and continue the questions sequentially.

Results tab

The Results tab will display the current state of your service management processes as well as the percentage of completion for each individual process.

Complete the service management process maturity assessment

The current-state assessment will be the foundation of building your roadmap, so pay close attention to the questions and answer them truthfully.

1. Start with tab 1 in the Service Management Process Maturity Assessment Tool. Remember to read the questions carefully and always use the feedback obtained through the end-user survey to help you determine the answer.
2. In the “Degree of Process Completeness” column, use the drop-down menu to input the results solicited from the goals and objectives meeting you held with your project participants.

3. Host a meeting with all participants following completion of the survey and have them bring their results. Discuss in a round-table setting, keeping a master sheet of agreed upon results.

INPUT

• Service Management Process Maturity Assessment Tool questions

OUTPUT

• Determination of current state

Materials

• Service Management Process Maturity Assessment Tool

Participants

• Project team members

Review the results of your current-state assessment

At the end of the assessment, the Results tab will have action items you could perform to close the gaps identified by the process assessment tool.

INPUT

• Maturity assessment results

OUTPUT

• Determination of overall and individual practice maturity

Materials

• Service Management Maturity Assessment Tool

Participants

• Project team members

Use Info-Tech’s OCM Capability Assessment tool to understand your current state

The Organizational Change Management Capabilities Assessment tool will help you understand the true state of your organizational change management capabilities.

Complete the Capabilities tab to capture the current state for organizational change management. Review the Results tab for interpretation of the capabilities. Review the Recommendations tab for actions to address low areas of maturity.

Complete the OCM capability assessment

1. Open Organizational Change Management Capabilities Assessment tool.
2. Come to consensus on the most appropriate answer for each question. Use the 80/20 rule.
3. Review result charts and discuss findings.
4. Identify roadmap items based on maturity assessment.

INPUT

• A collaborative discussion

OUTPUT

• OCM Assessment tool
• OCM assessment results

Materials

• OCM Capabilities Assessment tool

Participants

• All stakeholders

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

2.1

Create a powerful, succinct mission statement

Using Info-Tech’s sample mission statement as a guide, build your mission statement based on the objectives of this project and the benefits that this project will achieve. Keep the mission statement short and clear.

2.2

Complete the assessment

With the project team in the room, go through all three parts of the assessment with consideration of the feedback received from the business.

2.3

Interpret the results of the assessment

The Info-Tech onsite analyst will facilitate a discussion on the overall maturity of your service management practices and individual process maturity. Are there any surprises? Are the results reflective of current service delivery maturity?

PHASE 3

Build Your Service Management Roadmap

Build Roadmap

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Document your vision and mission on the roadmap one-pager.
• Using the inputs from the current-state assessments, identify the key themes required by your organization.
• Identify individual initiatives needed to address key themes.

Step Insights

• Using the Info-Tech thought model, address foundational gaps early in your roadmap and establish the management methods to continuously make them more robust.
• If any of the core practices are not meeting the vision for your service management program, be sure to address these items before moving on to more advanced service management practices or processes.
• Make sure the story you are telling with your roadmap is aligned to the overall organizational goals.

Phase 3 outline

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

Focus on a strong foundation to build higher value service management practices

Info-Tech Insight

Focus on behaviors and expected outcomes before processes.

Foundational elements

• Operating model facilitates service management goals
• Culture of service delivery
• Governance discipline to evaluate, direct, and monitor
• Management discipline to deliver

Stabilize

• Deliver stable, reliable IT services to the business
• Respond to user requests quickly and efficiently
• Resolve user issues in a timely manner
• Deploy changes smoothly and successfully

Proactive

• Avoid/prevent service disruptions
• Improve quality of service (performance, availability, reliability)

Service Provider

• Understand business needs
• Ensure services are available
• Measure service performance, based on business-oriented metrics

Strategic Partner

• Fully aligned with business
• Drive innovation
• Drive measurable value

Info-Tech Insight

Continued leadership support of the foundational elements will allow delivery teams to provide value to the business. Set the expectation of the desired maturity level and allow teams to innovate.

Identify themes that can help you build a strong foundation before moving to higher level practices

Before moving to advanced service management practices, you must ensure that the foundational and core elements are robust enough to support them. Leadership must nurture these practices to ensure they are sustainable and can support higher value, more mature practices.

Use Info-Tech’s “Service Management Roadmap” template to document your vision, themes and initiatives

The Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template contains a roadmap template to help communicate your vision, themes to be addressed, and initiatives

Working from the lower maturity items to the higher value practices, identify logical groupings of initiatives into themes. This will aid in communicating the reasons for the needed changes. List the individual initiatives below the themes. Adding the service management vision and mission statements can help readers understand the roadmap.

Document your service management roadmap

1. Document the service management vision and mission on the roadmap template.
2. Identify, from the assessments, areas that need to be improved or implemented.
3. Group the individual initiatives into logical themes that can ease communication of what needs to happen.
4. Document the individual initiatives.
5. Document in terms that business partners and executive sponsors can understand.

INPUT

• Current-state assessment outputs
• Maturity model

OUTPUT

• Service management roadmap

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Roadmap template

Participants

• All stakeholders

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

3.1

Identify themes to address items from the foundational level up to higher value service management practices

Identify easily understood themes that will help others understand the expected outcomes within your organization.

Document individual initiatives that contribute to the themes

Identify specific activities that will close gaps identified in the assessments.

PHASE 2

Build Communication Slide

Complete your service management roadmap

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Use the current-state assessment exercises to document the state of your service management practices. Document examples of the behaviors that are currently seen.
• Document the expected short-term gains. Describe how you want the behaviors to change.
• Document the long-term vision for each item and describe the benefits you expect to see from addressing each theme.

Step Insights

• Use the communication template to acknowledge the areas that need to be improved and paint the short- and long-term vision for the improvements to be made through executing the roadmap.
• Write it in business terms so that it can be used widely to gain acceptance of the upcoming changes that need to occur.
• Include specific areas that need to be fixed to make it more tangible.
• Adding the values from the vision, mission, and values exercise can also help you set expectations about how the team will behave as they move towards the longer-term vision.

Phase 4 Outline

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

Use Info-Tech’s “Service Management Roadmap – Brought to Life” template to paint a picture of the future state

The Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template contains a communication template to help communicate your vision of the future state

Use this template to demonstrate how existing pain points to delivering services will improve over time by painting a near- and long-term picture of how things will change. Also list specific initiatives that will be launched to affect the changes. Listing the values identified in the vision, mission, and values exercise will also demonstrate the team’s commitment to changing behavior to create better outcomes.

Document your current state and list initiatives to address them

1. Use the previous assessments and feedback from business or customers to identify current behaviors that need addressing.
2. Focus on high-impact items for this document, not an extensive list.

3. List the initiatives or actions that will be used to address the specific pain points.

INPUT

• Current-state assessment outputs
• Feedback from business

OUTPUT

• Service Management Roadmap Communication Tool, in the Service Management Roadmap Presentation

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Roadmap template

Participants

• All stakeholders

Document your future state

1. For each pain point document the expected behaviors, both short term and longer term.
2. Write in terms that allow readers to understand what to expect from your service management practice.

INPUT

• Current-state assessment outputs
• Feedback from business

OUTPUT

• Service Management Roadmap Communication Tool, in the Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Roadmap template

Participants

• All stakeholders

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

4.1

Identify the pain points and initiatives to address them

Identify items that the business can relate to and initiatives or actions to address them.

4.2

Identify short- and long-term expectations for service management

Communicate the benefits of executing the roadmap both short- and long-term gains.

Research contributors and experts

Valence Howden, Principal Research Director, CIO Practice

Info-Tech Research Group

Valence helps organizations be successful through optimizing how they govern, design, and execute strategies, and how they drive service excellence in all work. With 30 years of IT experience in the public and private sectors, he has developed experience in many information management and technology domains, with focus in service management, enterprise and IT governance, development and execution of strategy, risk management, metrics design and process design, and implementation and improvement.

Graham Price, Research Director, CIO Practice

Info-Tech Research Group

Graham has an extensive background in IT service management across various industries with over 25 years of experience. He was a principal consultant for 17 years, partnering with Fortune 500 clients throughout North America, leveraging and integrating industry best practices in IT service management, service catalog, business relationship management, IT strategy, governance, and Lean IT and Agile.

Sharon Foltz, Senior Workshop Director

Info-Tech Research Group

Sharon is a Senior Workshop Director at Info-Tech Research Group. She focuses on bringing high value to members via leveraging Info-Tech’s blueprints and other resources enhanced with her breadth and depth of skills and expertise. Sharon has spent over 15 years in various IT roles in leading companies within the United States. She has strong experience in organizational change management, program and project management, service management, product management, team leadership, strategic planning, and CRM across various global organizations.

Related Info-Tech Research

Build a Roadmap for Service Management Agility

Extend the Service Desk to the Enterprise

Bibliography

• “CIOs Emerge as Disruptive Innovators.” CSC Global CIO Survey: 2014-2015. Web.
• “Digital Transformation: How Is Your Organization Adapting?” CIO.com, 2018. Web.
• Goran, Julie, Laura LaBerge, and Ramesh Srinivasan. “Culture for a digital age.” McKinsey, July 2017. Web.
• The Qualities of Leadership: Leading Change. Cornelius & Associates, 14 April 2012.
• Wilkinson, Paul. “Culture, Ethics, and Behavior – Why Are We Still Struggling?” ITSM Tools, 5 July 2018. Web.

Re-Envision Enterprise Printing

Don't settle for printer consolidation; seek the elimination of print

Analystperspective

You're likely not in the printing business.
Prepare your organization for the future by reducing print.

Initiatives to reduce printers are often met with end-user resistance. Don't focus on the idea of taking something away from end users. Instead, focus on how print reduction fits into larger goals of business process improvement, and on opportunities to turn the vendor into a partner who drives business process improvement through ongoing innovation and print reduction.

What are your true print use cases? Except in some legitimate use cases, printing often introduces friction and does not lead to efficiencies. Companies investing in digital transformation and document management initiatives must take a hard look at business processes still reliant on hard copies. Assess your current state to identify what the current print volume and costs are and where there are opportunities to consolidate and reduce.

Change your financial model. The managed print services industry allows you to use a pay-as-you-go approach and right-size your print spend to the organization's needs. However, in order to do printing-as-a-service right, you will need to develop a good RFP and RFP evaluation process to make sure your needs are covered by the vendor, while also baking in assurances the vendor will partner with you for continuous print reduction.

Emily Sugerman
Research Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations
Info-Tech Research Group

Darin Stahl
Principal Research Advisor, Infrastructure & Operations
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive summary

Your Challenge

IT directors and business operations managers face several challenges:

• Too many known unknowns: Enterprises may be overspending on printing, but this spend is often unknown and untracked.
• Opportunity costs: By locking into conventional printer leases and outdated document management, you are locking yourself out of the opportunity to improve business processes.

Common Obstacles

Printer reduction initiatives are stymied by:

• End-user resistance: Though sometimes the use of paper remains necessary, end users often cling to paper processes out of concern about change.
• Lack of governance: You lack insight into legitimate print use cases and lack full control over procurement of devices and consumables.
• Overly generic RFP: Print requirements are not tailored to your organization, and your managed print services RFP does not ask enough of the vendor.

Info-Tech's Approach

Follow these steps to excise superfluous, costly printing:

• Identify reduction opportunities via a thorough inventory and requirements-gathering process, and educate others on the financial and non-financial benefits. Enforce reduced printing through policies.
• Change your printing financial model to print-as-a-service by building an RFP and scoring tool for managed print services that makes the vendor a partner in continuous innovation.
• Leverage durable print management software to achieve vendor-agnostic governance and visibility.

Info-Tech Insight

Don't settle for printer consolidation: seek to eliminate print and enlist your managed print services vendor to help you achieve that goal.

Your challenge

This research is designed to help organizations that aim to reduce printing long term

• Finally understand aggregate printing costs: Not surprisingly, printing has become a large hidden expense in IT. Enterprises may be overspending on printing, but this spend is often unknown and untracked. Printer consumables are purchased independently by each department, non-networked desktop printers are everywhere, and everyone seems to be printing in color.
• Walk the walk when it comes to digital transformation: Outdated document management practices that rely on unnecessary printing are not the foundation upon which the organization can improve business processes.
• Get out of the printing business: Hire a managed print provider and manage that vendor well.

"There will be neither a V-shaped nor U-shaped recovery in demand for printing paper . . . We are braced for a long L-shaped decline."
–Toru Nozawa, President, Nippon Paper Industries (qtd. in Nikkei Asia, 2020).

Weight of paper and paperboard generated in the U.S.*

*Comprises nondurable goods (including office paper), containers, and packaging.

**2020 data not available.

Source: EPA, 2020.

Common obstacles

These barriers make this challenge difficult to address for many organizations:

• Cost-saving opportunities are unclear: In most cases, nobody is accountable for controlling printing costs, so there's a lack of incentive to do so.
• End-user attachment to paper-based processes: For end users who have been relying on paper processes, switching to a new way of working can feel like a big ask, particularly if an optimized alternative has not been provided and socialized.
• Legitimate print use cases are undefined: Print does still have a role in some business processes (e.g. for regulatory reasons). However, these business processes have not been analyzed to determine which print use cases are still legitimate. The WFH experience during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that many workflows that previously incorporated printing could be digitized. Indeed, the overall attachment to office paper is declining (see chart).
• Immature RFP and RFP scoring methods: Outsourcing print to a managed service provider necessitates careful attention to RFP building and scoring. If your print requirements are not properly tailored to your organization and your managed print services RFP does not ask enough of the vendor, it will be harder to hold your vendor to account.

How important is paper in your office?

Quocirca, a printer industry market research firm, found that the number of organizations for whom paper is "fairly or very important to their business" has dropped 10 percentage points between 2019 and 2021.

Source: Quocirca, 2021.

Info-Tech's approach

Permanently change your company's print culture

1. Plan your Project

• Create your project charter, investigate end user printer behavior and reduction opportunities, gather requirements and calculate printer costs

• Protect yourself by building the right requirements into your RFP, evaluating candidates and negotiating from a strong position

• Identify printers to consolidate and eliminate, install them, and communicate updated printer policy

The Info-Tech difference:

1. Use Info-Tech's tracking tools to finally track data on printer inventory and usage.
2. Get to an RFP for managed print services faster through Info-Tech's requirement selection activity, and use Info-Tech's scoring tool template to more quickly compare candidates and identify frontrunners and knockouts.
3. Use Info-Tech's guidance on print management software to decouple your need to govern the fleet from any specific vendor.

Info-Tech's methodology for Re-Envision Enterprise Printing

Insight summary

Keep an eye on the long-term goal of eliminating print

Don't settle for printer consolidation: seek to eliminate print and enlist your managed print services vendor to help you achieve that goal.

Persuading leaders is key

Good metrics and visible improvement are important to strengthen executive support for a long-term printer reduction strategy.

Tie printer reduction into business process improvement

Achieve long-lasting reductions in print through document management and improved workflow processes.

Maintain clarity on what types of printer use are and aren't supported by IT

Modifying and enforcing printing policies can help reduce use of printers.

Print management software allows for vendor-agnostic continuity

Print management software should be vendor-agnostic and allow you to manage devices even if you change vendors or print services.

Secure a better financial model from the provider

Simply changing your managed print services pay model to "pay-per-click" can result in large cost savings.

Blueprint deliverables

Key deliverable:

Managed Print Services RFP

This blueprint's key deliverable is a completed RFP for enterprise managed print services, which feeds into a scoring tool that accelerates the requirements selection and vendor evaluation process.

Managed Print Services Vendor Assessment Questions

Managed Print Services RFP Template

Managed Print Services RFP Vendor Proposal Scoring Tool

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

Enterprise Printing Project Charter

Document the parameters of the print reduction project, your goals, desired business benefits, metrics.

Enterprise Printing Roles and Responsibilities RACI Guide

Assign key tasks for the project across strategy & planning, vendor selection, implementation, and operation.

Printer Policy

Start with a policy template that emphasizes reduction in print usage and adjust as needed for your organization.

Printer Reduction Tool

Track the printer inventory and calculate total printing costs.

End-User Print Requirements Survey

Base your requirements in end user needs and feedback.

Blueprint benefits

IT benefits

• Make the project charter for printer reduction and estimate cost savings
• Determine your organization's current printing costs, usage, and capabilities
• Define your organization's printing requirements and select a solution
• Develop a printer policy and implement the policy

Business benefits

• Understand the challenges involved in reducing printers
• Understand the potential of this initiative to reduce costs
• Accelerate existing plans for modernization of paper-based business processes by reducing printer usage
• Contribute to organizational environmental sustainability targets

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

Guided Implementation

"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

Workshop

"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

Consulting

"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

Phase 1

Strategy and Planning

Re-Envision Enterprise Printing

• This phase will walk you through the following activities:
• Create a list of enterprise print roles and responsibilities
• Create project charter
• Inventory printer fleet and calculate printing costs
• Examine current printing behavior and identify candidates for device elimination
• Gather requirements, including through end user survey

This phase involves the following participants:

• IT director/CIO
• Business operations manager
• Project manager

Step 1.1

Create project charter and assign roles

Outcomes of this step

Completed Project Charter with RACI chart

Phase 1: Strategy and Planning

• Step 1.1 Create project charter and assign roles
• Step 1.2 Assess current state
• Step 1.3 Gather requirements

This step involves the following participants:

• IT director/CIO
• Business operations manager
• Project manager

Activities in this step

• Create a list of enterprise print roles and responsibilities
• Create project charter

1.1 Create project charter

Use the project charter to clearly define the scope and avoid scope creep

Identify project purpose

• Why is the organization taking on this project? What are you trying to achieve?
• What is the important background you need to document? How old is the fleet? What kinds of printer complaints do you get? What percentage of the IT budget does printing occupy?
• What specific goals should this project achieve? What measurable financial and non-financial benefits do these goals achieve?

Identify project scope

• What functional requirements do you have?
• What outputs are expected?
• What constraints will affect this project?
• What is out of scope for this project?

What are the main roles and responsibilities?

• Who is doing what for this project?

How will you measure success?

• What are the project's success metrics and KPIs?

Enterprise Printing Project Charter

Anticipate stakeholder resistance

Getting management buy-in for printer reduction is often one of the biggest challenges of the project.

Info-Tech Insight

If printer reduction is not driven and enforced from the top down, employees will find ways to work around your policies and changes. Do not attempt to undertake printer reduction initiatives without alerting executives. Ensure visible executive support to achieve higher cost savings.

Align the printer reduction project to org goals to achieve buy-in

A successful IT project demonstrates clear connections to business goals

Which business and organizational goals and drivers are supported by IT's intention to transform its printing ecosystem? For example,

Legislation: In 2009, the Washington House of Representatives passed a bill requiring state agencies to implement a plan to reduce paper consumption by 30% (State of Washington, 2009). The University of Washington cites this directive as one of the drivers for their plans to switch fully to electronic records by 2022 (University of Washington, n.d.).

Health care modernization: Implementing electronic health records; reducing paper charts.

Supply chain risk reduction: In 2021, an Ontario district school board experienced photocopier toner shortages and were forced to request schools to reduce printing and photocopying: "We have recommended to all locations that the use of printing be minimized as much as possible and priority given to the printing of sensitive and confidential documentation" (CBC, 2021).

Identify overall organizational goals in the following places:

• Company mission statements
• Corporate website
• Business strategy documents
• Other IT strategy documents
• Executives

Document financial and non-financial benefits

Financial benefits: Printer reduction can reduce your printing costs and improve printing capabilities.

• Printer reduction creates a controlled print environment; poorly controlled print environments breed unnecessary costs.
• Cost savings can be realized through:
  • Elimination of cost-efficient inkjet desktop printers.
  • Elimination of high-cost, inefficient, or underutilized printers.
  • Sharing of workshop printers between an optimal number of end users.
  • Replacing separate printers, scanners, copiers, and fax machines with. multi-function devices.
• Cost savings can be achieved through a move to managed print services, if you negotiate the contract well and manage the vendor properly. The University of Washington estimated a 20-25% cost reduction under a managed print services model compared to the existing lease (University of Washington, "What is MPS").

Non-financial benefits: Although the main motivation behind printer reduction is usually cost savings, there are also non-financial benefits to the project.

• Printer reduction decreases physical space required for printers
• Printer reduction meets employee and client environmental demands
  • Printer reduction can reduce the electricity and consumables used
  • Reduction in consumables means reduced hazardous waste from consumables and devices
• Printer reduction can result in better printing capabilities
  • Moving to a managed print services model can provide you with better printing capabilities with higher availability

Assign responsibility to track print device costs to IT

Problem:
Managers in many organizations wrongly assume that since IT manages the printer devices, they also already manage costs.

However, end users typically order printer devices and supplies through the supplies/facilities department, bypassing any budget approval process, or through IT, which does not have any authority or incentive to restrict requests (when they're not measured against the controlling of printer costs).

Organization-wide printer usage policies are rarely enforced with any strictness.

Without systematic policy enforcement, end-user print behavior becomes frivolous and generates massive printing costs.

Solution:
Recommend all print device costs be allocated to IT.

• Aggregate responsibility: Recommend that all printer costs be aggregated under IT's budget and tracked by IT staff.
• Assign accountability: Although supplies may continually be procured by the organization's supplies/facilities department, IT should track monthly usage and costs by department.
• Enforce policy: Empower IT with the ability to enforce a strict procurement policy that ensures all devices in the print environment are approved models under IT's control. This eliminates having unknown devices in the printer fleet and allows for economies of scale to be realized from purchasing standardized printing supplies.
• Track metrics: IT should establish metrics to measure and control each department's printer usage and flat departments that exceed their acceptable usage amounts.

Assign accountability for the initiative

Someone needs to have accountability for both the printer reduction tasks and the ongoing operation tasks, or the initiative will quickly lose momentum.

Customize Info-Tech's Enterprise Printing Roles and Responsibilities RACI Guide RACI chart to designate project roles and responsibilities to participants both inside and outside IT.

These tasks fall under the categories of:

• Strategy and planning
• Vendor selection, evaluation, and acquisition
• Implementation
• Operate

Assign a RACI: Remember the meaning of the different roles

• Responsible (does the work on a day-to-day basis)
• Accountable (reviews, signs off on, and is held accountable for outcomes)
• Consulted (input is sought to feed into decision making)
• Informed (is given notification of outcomes)

As a best practice, no more than one person should be responsible or accountable for any given process. The same person can be both responsible and accountable for a given process, or it could be two different people.

Avoid making someone accountable for a process if they do not have full visibility into the process for appropriate oversight, or do not have time to give the process sufficient attention.

The Enterprise Printing Roles and Responsibilities RACI Guide can be used to organize and manage these tasks.

Define metrics to measure success

Track your project success by developing and tracking success metrics

Ensure your metrics relate both to business value and customer satisfaction. "Reduction of print" is a business metric, not an experience metric.

Frame metrics around experience level agreements (XLAs) and experience level objectives (XLOs): What are the outcomes the customer wants to achieve and the benefits they want to achieve? Tie the net promoter score into the reporting from the IT service management system, since SLAs are still needed to tactically manage the achievement of the XLOs.

Use the Metrics Development Workbook from Info-Tech's Develop Meaningful Service Metrics to define:

• Relevant stakeholders
• Their goals and pain points
• The success criteria that must be met to achieve these goals
• The key indicators that must be measured to achieve these goals from an IT perspective
• What the appropriate IT metrics are, based on all of the above

Metrics could include

• User satisfaction
• Print services net promoter model
• Total printing costs
• Printer availability (uptime)
• Printer reliability (mean time between failures)
• Total number of reported incidents
• Mean time for vendor to respond and repair

Info-Tech Insight:

Good metrics and visible improvement are important to strengthen executive support for a long-term printer reduction strategy.

Step 1.2

Assess current state

Outcomes of this step

• Aggregate view of your printer usage and costs

Strategy and Planning

This step involves the following participants:

• IT director/CIO
• Business operations manager
• Project manager

Activities in this step

• 1.2. Inventory your printer fleet: Office walk-around
• 1.2 Inventory your printer fleet: Collect purchase receipts/statements/service records
• 1.3 Calculate printing costs

Create an aggregate view of your printer usage and costs

Problem: Lack of visibility

• Most organizations are unaware of the savings potential in reducing print due to a lack of data.
• Additionally, organizations may have inappropriately sized devices for their workloads.
• Often, nobody is responsible for managing the printers collectively, resulting in a lack of visibility into printing activity. Without this visibility, it is difficult to muster executive commitment and support for printer reduction efforts.
• The first step to eliminating your printers is to inventory all the printers in the organization and look at an aggregate view of the costs. Without understanding the cost saving potential, management will likely continue to avoid printer changes due to the idea's unpopularity with end users.
• Valid use cases for printers will likely still remain, but these use cases should be based on a requirements analysis.

Create visibility through by following these steps:

1. Office walk-around: Most organizations have no idea how many printers they have until they walk around the office and physically count them. This is especially true in cases where management is allowed to purchase personal printers and keep them at their desks. An office walk-around is often necessary to accurately capture all the printers in your inventory.
2. Collect purchase receipts/statements/service records: Double-check your printer inventory by referring to purchase receipts, statements, and service records.
3. Identify other sources of costs: Printer purchases only make up a small fraction of total printing costs. Operating costs typically account for 95% of total printer costs. Make sure to factor in paper, ink/toner, electricity, and maintenance costs.

1.2.1 Inventory your printer fleet: part 1

Office walk-around

1. Methodically walk around the office and determine the following for each printer:
   • Device type
   • Make, model, serial number
   • Location
   • Number of users supported
   • Device owner
   • Type of users supported (department, employee position)
2. Record printer details in Tab 1 of Info-Tech's Printer Reduction Tool. Collaborate with the accounting or purchasing department to determine the following for each printer recorded:
   • Purchase price/date
   • Monthly duty cycle
   • Estimated remaining useful life
   • Page count to date

Download the Printer Reduction Tool

1.2.2 Inventory your printer fleet:
part 2

Collect purchase receipts/statements/service records

1. Ask your purchasing manager for purchase receipts, statements, and service records relating to printing.
2. For documents found, match the printer with your physical inventory. Add any printers found that were not captured in the physical inventory count. Record the following:
   1. Device type
   2. Make, model, serial number
   3. Location
   4. Number of users supported
   5. Device owner
   6. Type of users supported (department, employee position)
3. 3. Collaborate with the accounting or purchasing department to determine the following for each printer recorded:
   1. Purchase price/date
   2. Monthly duty cycle
   3. Estimated remaining useful life
   4. Page count to date
4. Enter the data in Tab 1 of the Printer Reduction Tool

Download the Printer Reduction Tool

1.2.3 Calculate your printing costs

Collect purchase receipts/statements/service records

• Collect invoices, receipts, and service records to sum up the costs of paper, ink or toner, and maintenance for each machine. Estimate electricity costs.
• Record your costs in Tab 2 of the Printer Reduction Tool.
• Review the costs per page and per user to look for particularly expensive printers and understand the main drivers of the cost.
• Review your average monthly cost and annual cost per user. Do these costs surprise you?

Step 1.3

Gather printing requirements

Outcomes of this step

• Understanding of the organization's current printing behavior and habits
• Identification of how industry context and digitization of business processes have impacted current and future requirements

This step involves the following participants:

• IT director
• IT staff
• Rest of organization

Activities in this step

• Examine current printing behavior and habits
• Administer end-user survey
• Identify current requirements
• Identify future requirements

Requirements Gathering Overview

1. Identify opportunities to go paperless
   • Determine where business process automation is occurring
   • Align with environmental and sustainability campaigns
2. Identify current requirements
   • Review the types of document being printed and the corresponding features needed
   • Administer end-user survey to understand user needs and current printer performance
3. Identify future requirements

• Identify future requirements to avoid prematurely refreshing your printer fleet

Stop: Do not click "Print"

The most effective way to achieve durable printing cost reduction is simply to print less.

• Consolidating devices and removing cost-inefficient individual printers is a good first step to yielding savings.
• However, more sustainable success is achieved by working with the printer vendor(s) and the business on continuous innovation via proposals and initiatives that combine hardware, software, and services.
• Sustained print reduction depends on separate but related business process automation and digital innovation initiatives.

Info-Tech Insight:

Achieve long-lasting reductions in print through document management and improved workflow processes.

Leverage Info-Tech research to support your business' digital transformation

Define how changes to enterprise printing fit into digital transformation plans

Identify opportunities to go paperless

The "paperless office" has been discussed since the 1970s. The IT director alone does not have authority to change business processes. Ensure the print reduction effort is tied to other strategies and initiatives around digital transformation. Working on analog pieces of paper is not digital and may be eroding digital transformation process.

Leverage Info-Tech's Assert IT's Relevance During Digital Transformations to remind others that modernization of the enterprise print environment belongs to the discussion around increasing digitized support capabilities.

Eliminate business process friction caused by print

Analyze workflows for where they are still using paper. Ask probing questions about where paper still adds value and where the business process is a candidate for paperless digital transformation

• Is this piece of paper only being used to transfer information from one application to another?
• What kind of digitalization efforts have happened in the business as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic? Which workflows have digitized on their own?
• Where has e-signature been adopted?
• Is this use of paper non-negotiable (e.g. an ER triage that requires a small printer for forms; the need for bank tellers to provide receipts to customers)?
• Do we have compliance obligations that require us to retain a paper process?
• What is getting printed? Who is printing the most? Identify if there are recurring system-generated reports being printed daily/weekly/quarterly that are adding to the volume. Are reports going directly from staff mailboxes to a recycling bin?
• Does our print financial model incentivize the transformation of business processes, or does it reinforce old habits?
• What services, software, and solutions for document management and business process analysis does our managed print services vendor offer? Can we involve the vendor in the business transformation conversation by including an innovation clause in the next contract (re)negotiation to push the vendor to offer proposals for projects that reduce print?

Develop short-term and long-term print reduction strategies

Short-term strategies

• Consolidate the number of printers you have.
• Determine whether to outsource printing to a managed services provider and make the move.
• Enable print roaming and IT verification.
• Require user-queued print jobs to be authenticated at a printer to prevent print jobs that are lost or not picked up.
• Set up user quotas.
• Provide usage records to business managers so they can understand the true cost of printing.
• User quotas may create initial pushback, but they lead users to ask themselves whether a particular print job is necessary.
• Renegotiate print service contracts.
• Revisit contracts and shop around to ensure pricing is competitive.
• Leverage size and centralization by consolidating to a single vendor, and use the printing needs of the entire enterprise to decrease pricing and limit future contractual obligations.
• Train users on self-support.
• Train users to remedy paper jams and move paper in and out of paper trays.

Long-term strategies

• Promote a paperless culture by convincing employees of its benefits (greater cost savings, better security, easier access, centralized repository, greener).
• Educate users to use print area wisely.
• Develop campaigns to promote black and white printing or a paperless culture.

Info-Tech Insight:

One-time consolidation initiatives leave money on the table. The extra savings results from changes in printing culture and end-user behavior.

Examine current printing behavior and habits

It's natural for printer usage and printing costs to vary based on office, department, and type of employee. Certain jobs simply require more printing than others.

However, the printing culture within your organization likely also varies based on

• office
• department
• type of employee

Examine the printing behaviors of your employees based on these factors and determine whether their printing behavior aligns with the nature of their job.

Excessive printing costs attributed to departments or groups of employees that don't require much printing for their jobs could indicate poor printing culture and potentially more employee pushback.

Examine current printing behavior and habits, and identify candidates for elimination

1. Go to Tab 3 of your Printer Reduction Tool ("Usage Dashboard Refresh"). Right-click each table and press "Refresh."
2. Go to Tab 4 of your Printer Reduction Tool ("Usage Dashboard") to understand the following:
   1. Average printer utilization by department
   2. Pages printed per month by department
   3. Cost per user by department
3. Take note of the outliers and expensive departments.
4. Review printer inventory and printer use rates on Tab 5.
5. Decide which printers are candidates for elimination and which require more research.
6. If already working in a managed print services model, review the vendor's recommendations for printer elimination and consolidation.
7. Mark printers that could be eliminated or consolidated.

Administer end-user survey

Understand end-user printing requirements and current printer performance through an end-user survey

1. Customize Info-Tech's End-User Print Requirements Survey to help you understand your users' needs and the current performance of your printer fleet.
2. Send the survey to all printer users in the organization.
3. Collect the surveys and aggregate the requirements of users in each department.
4. Record the survey results in the "Survey Results" tab.

Download the End-User Print Requirements Survey

Info-Tech Insight:

Use an end-user printer satisfaction survey before and after any reduction efforts or vendor implementation, both as a requirement-gathering user input and to measure/manage the vendor.

Identify your current requirements

Collect all the surveys and aggregate user requirements. Input the requirements into your Printer Reduction Tool.

Discussion activity:

• Review the requirements for each department and discuss:
• What is this device being used for (e.g. internal documents, external documents, high-quality graphics/color)?
• Based on its use case, what kinds of features are needed (e.g. color printing, scanning to email, stapling)?
• Is this the right type of device for its purpose? Do we need this device, or can it be eliminated?
• Based on its use case, what kinds of security features are needed (e.g. secure print release)?
• Are there any compliance requirements that need to be satisfied (e.g. PCI, ITAR, HIPAA)?
• Based on its use case, what's the criticality of uptime?
• What is this device's place in the organization's workflow? What are its dependencies?
• With which systems is the device compatible? Is it compatible with the newer operating system versions? If not, determine whether the device is a refresh candidate.

Identify your future requirements

Prepare your printer fleet for future needs to avoid premature printer refreshes.

Discussion activity:

• Review the current requirements for each department's printers and discuss whether the requirements will meet the department's printing needs over the next 10 years.
• What is this device going to be used for in the next 10 years?
• Will use of this device be reduced by plans to increase workflow digitization?
• Based on its use case, what kinds of features are needed?
• Is this the right type of device for its purpose?
• Based on its use case, what kinds of security features are needed?
• Based on its use case, what is the criticality of uptime?
• Is this device's place in the organization's workflow going to change? What are its dependencies?
• Reassess your current requirements and make any changes necessary to accommodate for future requirements.

Examine requirements specific to your industry and workflow

Some common examples of industries with specific printing requirements:

• Healthcare
  • Ability to comply with HIPAA requirements
  • High availability and reliability with on-demand support and quick response times
  • Built-in accounting software for billing purposes
  • Barcode printing for hospital wristbands
  • Fax requirements
• Manufacturing
  • Barcoding technology
  • Ability to meet regulations such as FDA requirements for the pharmaceutical industry
  • Ability to integrate with ERP systems
• Education
  • Password protection for sensitive student information
  • Test grading solutions
  • Paper tests for accessibility needs

Phase 2

Vendor Selection, Evaluation, Acquisition

Re-Envision Enterprise Printing

• This phase will walk you through the following activities:
• Define managed print services RFP requirement questions
• Create managed print services RFP and scoring tool
• Score the RFP responses

This phase involves the following participants:

• IT director/CIO
• Business operations manager
• Project manager

Change your financial model

The managed print services industry allows you to use a pay-as-you-go approach and right-size your print spend to the organization's needs.

Avoid being locked into a long lease where the organization pays a fixed monthly fee whether the printer runs or not.

Instead, treat enterprise printing as a service, like the soda pop machine in the break room, where the vendor is paid when the device is used. If the vending machine is broken, the vendor is not paid until the technician restores it to operability. Printers can work the same way.

By moving to a per click/page financial model, the vendor installs and supports the devices and is paid whenever a user prints. Though the organization pays more on a per-click/page basis compared to a lease, the vendor is incentivized to right-size the printer footprint to the organization, and the organization saves on monthly recurring lease costs and maintenance costs.

Right-size commitments: If the organization remains on a lease instead of pay-per-click model, it should right-size the commitment if printing drops below a certain volume. In the agreement, include a business downturn clause that allows the organization to right-size and protect itself in the event of negative growth.

Understand the managed print services model and its cost savings

Outsourcing print services can monitor and balance your printers and optimize your fleet for efficiency. Managed print services are most appropriate for:

• Organizations engaging in high-volume, high-quality print jobs with growing levels of output.
• Organizations with many customer-facing print jobs.

There are three main managed printing service models. Sometimes, an easy switch from a level pay model to a pay-per-click model can result in substantial savings:

Level Pay

• Flat rate per month based on estimates.
• Attempts to flatten IT's budgeting so printing costs are consistent every month or every year (for budgeting purposes). At the end of the year, the amount of supplies used is added up and compared with the initial estimates and adjusted accordingly.
• The customer pays the same predictable fee each month every year, even if you don't meet the maximum print quantity for the pay. Increased upcharge for quantities exceeding maximum print quantity.

Base Plus Click

• Fixed base payment (lease or rental) + pay-per-sheet for services.
• In addition to the monthly recurring base cost, you pay for what you use. This contract may be executed with or without a minimum monthly page commitment. Page count through remote monitoring technologies is typically required.

Pay Per Click

• Payment is solely based on printing usage.
• Printing costs will likely be the lowest with this option, but also the most variable.
• This option requires a minimum monthly page commitment and/or minimum term.

Info-Tech Insight:

Vendors typically do not like the pay-per-click option and will steer businesses away from it. However, this option holds the vendor accountable for the availability and reliability of your printers, and Info-Tech generally recommends this option.

Compare financials of each managed print services option

Your printing costs with a pay-per-click model are most reflective of your actual printer usage. Level pay tends to be more expensive, where you need to pay for overages but don't benefit from printing less than the maximum allocated.

See the below cost comparison example with level pay set at a maximum of 120,000 impressions per month. In the level pay model, the organization was paying for 120,000 sheets in the month it only used 60,000 impressions, whereas it would have been able to pay just for the 60,000 sheets in the pay-per-click model.

Financial comparison case study

This organization compared estimated costs over a 36-month period for the base-plus-click and pay-per-page models for Toshiba E Studio 3515 AC Digital Color Systems.

Results

Though the per-image cost for each image is lower in the base-plus-click model, the added monthly recurring costs for the lease means the "net pay per click" is higher.

Overall, the pay-per-page estimate saved $10,044 over a 36-month period for this device.

Bake continuing innovation into your requirements

Once you are in the operation phase, you will need to monitor and analyze trends in company printing in order to make recommendations for the future and to identify areas for possible savings and/or asset optimization.

Avoid a scenario where the vendor drops the printer in your environment and returns only for repairs. Engage the vendor in this continuous innovation work:

In the managed services agreement, include a proviso for continuous innovation where the vendor has a contractual obligation to continually look at the business process flow and bring yearly proposals to show innovation (e.g. cost reductions; opportunities to reduce print, which allows the vendor to propose document management services and record keeping services). Leverage vendors who are building up capabilities to transform business processes to help with the heavy lifting.

Establish a vision for the relationship that goes beyond devices and toner. The vendor can make a commitment to continuous management and constant improvement, instead of installing the devices and leaving. Ideally, this produces a mutually beneficial situation: The client asks the vendor to sell them ways to mature and innovate the business processes, while the vendor retains the business and potentially sells new services. In order to retain your business, the vendor must continue to learn and know about your business.

The metric of success for your organization is the simple reduction in printed copies overall. The vendor success metric would be proposals that may combine hardware, software, and services that provide cost-effective reductions in print through document management and workflow processes. The vendors should be keen to build this into the relationship since the services delivery has a higher margin for them.

Sample requirement wording:

"Continuing innovation: The contractor initiates at least one (1) project each year of the contract that shows leadership and innovation in solutions and services for print, document management, and electronic recordkeeping. Bidders must describe a sample project in their response, planning for an annual investment of approximately 50 consulting hours and $10,000 in hardware and/or software."

Reward the vendor for performance instead of "punishing" them for service failures

Problem: Printer downtime and poor service is causing friction with your managed service provider (MSP).

MSPs often offer clients credit requests (service credits) for their service failures, which are applied to the previous month's monthly recurring charge. They are applied to the last month's MRC (monthly reoccurring charges) at the end of term and then the vendor pays out the residual.

However, while common, service credits are not always perceived to be a strong incentive for the provider to continually focus on improvement of mean time to respond or mean time to repair.

Solution: Turn your vendor into a true partner by including an "earn back" condition in the contract.

• Engage the vendor as a true partner within a relationship based upon service credits.
• Suggest that the vendor include a minor change to the non-performance processes within the final agreement: the vendor implements an "earn back" condition in the agreement.
• Where a bank of service credits exists because of non-performance, if the provider exceeds the SLA performance metrics for a number of consecutive months (two is common), then a given number of prior credits received by the client are returned to the provider as a reward for improved performance.
• This can be a useful mechanism to drive improved performance.

Leverage enterprise print management software

Printers are commoditized and can come and go, but print management software enables the governance, compliance, savings and visibility necessary for the transformation

• Printer management solutions range from tools bundled with ink-jet printers that track consumables' status, to software suites that track data for thousands of print devices.
• Typically, these solutions arrive in enterprises as part of larger managed services printing engagements, bundled with hardware, financing, maintenance, and "services."
• Bundling print management software means that customers very rarely seek to acquire printing management software alone.
• Owing to the level of customization (billing, reporting, quotas, accounts, etc.) switching print management software solutions is also rare. The work you put into this software will remain with IT regardless of your hardware.
• Durability of print management software is also influenced by the hardware- and technology-agnostic nature of the solutions (e.g. swapping one vendor's devices for another does not trigger anything more than a configuration change in print management software.)

Include enterprise print management requirements in the RFP

Ask respondents to describe their managed services capabilities and an optional on-premises, financed solution with these high-level capabilities.

Select the appropriate type of print management software

Vendor-provided solutions are adequate control for small organizations with simple print environments

• Suitable for small organizations (<100 users).
• Software included with print devices can pool print jobs, secure access, and centralize job administration.
• Dealing with complex sales channels for third-party vendors is likely a waste of resources.

SMBs with greater print control needs can leverage mid-level solutions to manage behavior

• Suitable for mid-size organizations (<500 users).
• Mid-level software can track costs, generate reports, and centralize management.
• Solutions start at $500 but require additional per-device costs.

Full control solutions will only attract large organizations with a mature print strategy

• Full control solutions tend to be suitable for large organizations (>500 users) with complex print environments and advanced needs.
• Full control software allows for absolute enforcement of printing policies and full control of printing.
• Expect to spend thousands for a tailored solution that will save time and guide cost savings.

Enterprise print management software features

The feature set for these tools is long and comprehensive. The feature list below is not exhaustive, as specific tools may have additional product capabilities.

Get to the managed print services RFP quicker

Jumpstart your requirements process using these tools and exercises

Vendor Assessment Questions

Use Info-Tech's catalog of commonly used questions and requirements in successful acquisition processes for managed print services. Ask the right questions to secure an agreement that meets your needs. If you are already in a contract with managed print services, take the opportunity of contract renewal to improve the contract and service.

RFP Template and "Schedule 1" Attachment

Add your finalized assessment questions into this table, which you will attach to your RFP. The vendor answers questions in this "Schedule 1" attachment and returns it to you.

RFP Scoring Tool

Aggregate the RFP responses into this scoring tool to identify the frontrunners and candidates for elimination. Since the vendors are asked to respond in a standard format, it is easier to bring together all the responses to create a complete view of your options.

Define RFP requirement questions

Include the right requirements for your organization, and avoid leaving out important requirements that might have been overlooked.

1. Download the Managed Print Services Vendor Assessment Questions tool. Use this document as a "shopping list" to jumpstart an initial draft of the RFP and, more importantly, scoring requirements.
2. Review the questions in the context of your near- and long-term printer outsourcing needs. Consider your environment, your requirements, and goals. Include other viewpoints from the RACI chart from Phase 1.
3. Place an 'X' in the first column to retain the question. Edit the wording of the question if required, based on your organizational needs.
4. Use the second column to indicate which section of the RFP to include the question in.

Download the Managed Print Services Vendor Assessment Questions tool

Create RFP scoring tool and RFP

1. Enter the requirements questions into the scoring tool on Tabs 2 and 4.
2. Tab 2: Create scoring column for each vendor. You will paste in their responses here.
3. Edit Tabs 3 and 4 so they align with what you want the vendor to see. Copy and paste Tab 3 and Tab 4 into a new document, which will serve as a "Schedule 1" attachment to the RFP package the vendor receives.
4. Complete the RFP template. Describe your current state and current printer hardware (documented in the earlier current-state assessment). Explain the rules of how to respond and how to fill out the Schedule 1 document. Instruct each vendor to fill in their responses to each question along with any notes, and to reply with a zip file that includes the completed RFP package along with any marketing material needed to support their response.
5. Send a copy of the RFP and Schedule 1 to each vendor under consideration.

Download the Managed Print Services RFP Vendor Proposal Scoring Tool

Download the Managed Print Services RFP template

Score RFP responses

1. When the responses are returned, copy and paste each vendor's results from Schedule 1 into Tab 2 of the main scoring tool.
2. Evaluate each RFP response against the RFP criteria based on the scoring scale.
3. Send the completed scoring tool to the CIO.
4. Set up a meeting to discuss the scores and generate shortlist of vendors.
5. Conduct further interviews with shortlisted vendors for due diligence, pricing, and negotiation discussions.
6. Once a vendor is selected, review the SLAs and contract and develop a transition plan.

Info-Tech Insight:

The responses from the low-scoring vendors still have value: these providers will likely provide ideas that you can then leverage with your frontrunner, even if their overall proposal did not score highly.

Phase 3

Implementation & Operation

Re-Envision Enterprise Printing

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• Update your enterprise printer policies
• Readminister end-user survey to measure project success

This phase involves the following participants:

• IT director/CIO
• Business operations manager
• Project manager

Modify your printer policies

Review and modify Info-Tech's Printer Policy Template to support your print reduction goals

Consider that your goal is to achieve printer reduction. Discuss with your team how strict it needs to be to truly reset behavior with printers. Many organizations struggle with policy enforcement. Firm language in the policy may be required to achieve this goal. For example,

• IT only supports the printers acquired through the managed print service. Personal desktop printers are not supported by IT. Expense statements will not be accepted for non-supported printers.
• Create a procurement policy where all device requests need justification and approval by department managers and IT. Have a debate over what the extreme exceptions would be. Legitimate exceptions must go through a review and approval process.
• Restrict color printing to external or customer-facing use cases.
• Encourage digital or electronic solutions in lieu of hard copies (e.g. e-signatures and approval workflows; scanning; use of integrated enterprise applications like SharePoint).

Download the Printer Policy template

Readminister the end-user survey

You have already run this survey during the requirements-gathering phase. Run it again to measure success.

The survey was run once prior to the changes being implemented to establish a baseline of user satisfaction and to gain insights into additional requirements.

Several months after the initial rollout (90 days is typical to let the dust settle), resurvey the end users and publish or report to the administration success metrics (the current costs vs. the actual costs prior to the change).

User satisfaction survey can be used to manage the vendor, especially if the users are less happy after the vendor touched their environment. Use this feedback to hold the provider to account for improvement.

Measure project success

Revisit the pre-project metrics and goals and compare with your current metrics

• Identify printers to consolidate or eliminate.
• Update asset management system (enter software and hardware serial numbers or identification tags into configuration management system).
• Reallocate/install printers across the organization.
• Develop ongoing printer usage and cost reports for each department.
• Review the end-user survey and compare against baseline.
• Operate, validate, and distribute usage metrics/chargeback to stakeholders.
• Audit and report on environmental performance and sustainability performance to internal and external bodies, as required.
• Write and manage knowledgebase articles.
• Monitor and analyze trends in company printing in order to make recommendations for the future and to identify areas for possible savings and/or asset optimization.

Metrics could include

• User satisfaction
• Print services net promoter model
• Total printing costs
• Printer availability (uptime)
• Printer reliability (mean time between failures)
• Total number of reported incidents
• Mean time for vendor to respond and repair

Support training and adoption

Train users on self-support

Prepare troubleshooting guides and step-by-step visual aid posters for the print areas that guide users to print, release, and find their print jobs and fix common incidents on their own. These may include:

• The name of this printer location and the names of the others on that floor.
• How to enter a PIN to release a print job.
• How to fix a paper jam.
• How to empty the paper tray.
• How to log a service ticket if all other steps are exhausted.

Educate users to use print area wisely

• Inform users what to do if other print jobs appear to be left behind in the printer area.
• Display guidelines on printer location alternatives in case of a long line.
• Display suggestions on maximum recommended time to spend on a job in the event other users are waiting.

Develop campaign to promote paperless culture

Ensure business leadership and end users remain committed to thinking before they print.

• Help your users avoid backsliding by soliciting feedback on the new printer areas.
• Ensure timely escalation of service tickets to the vendor.
• Support efforts by the business to seek out business process modernization opportunities whenever possible.

Plan persuasive communication strategies

Identify cost-saving opportunities and minimize complaints through persuasive communication

Implement a continual improvement plan to achieve long-term enterprise print goals

Implement a continual improvement plan for enterprise printing:

• Develop a vendor management plan:
  • In order to govern SLAs and manage the vendor, ensure that you can track printer-related tickets even if the device is now supported by managed print services.
  • Ensure that printer service tickets sent from the device to the vendor are also reconciled in your ITSM tool. Require the MSP to e-bond the ticket created within their own device and ticketing system back to you so you can track it in your own ITSM tool.
  • Every two months, validate service credits that can be returned to the vendor for exceeding SLA performance metrics.
  • Monitor the impact of their digital transformation strategies. Develop a cadence to review the vendor's suggestions for innovation opportunities.
• Operate, validate, and distribute usage and experience metrics/chargeback to stakeholders.
• Monitor and analyze trends in company printing.

Summary of Accomplishment

Problem Solved

You have now re-envisioned your enterprise print environment by documenting your current printer inventory and current cost and usage. You also have hard inventory and usage data benchmarks that you can use to measure the success of future initiatives around digitalization, going paperless, and reducing print cost.

You have also developed a plan to go to market and become a consumer of managed print services, rather than a provider yourself. You have established a reusable RFP and requirements framework to engage a managed print services vendor who will work with you to support your continuous improvement plans.

Return to the deliverables and advice in this blueprint to reinforce the organization's message to end users on when, where, and how to print. Ideally, this project has helped you go beyond a printer refresh – but rather served as a means to change the printing culture at your organization.

If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

Contact your account representative for more information

workshops@infotech.com
1-888-670-8889

Bibliography

Fernandes, Louella. "Quocirca Managed Services Print Market, 2021." Quocirca, 25 Mar. 2021. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.

McInnes, Angela. "No More Photocopies, No More Ink: Thames Valley Schools Run Out of Toner." CBC, 21 Oct. 2021. Web.

"Paper and Paperboard: Material-Specific Data." EPA, 15 Dec. 2020. Accessed 15 Oct. 2021.

State of Washington, House of Representatives. "State Agencies – Paper Conservation and Recycling." 61st Legislature, Substitute House Bill 2287, Passed 20 April 2009.

Sugihara, Azusa. "Pandemic Shreds Office Paper Demand as Global Telework Unfolds." Nikkei Asia, 18 July 2020. Accessed 29 Sept. 2021.

"Paper Reduction." University of Washington, n.d. Accessed 28 Oct. 2021.

"What is MPS?" University of Washington, n.d. Accessed 16 Mar. 2022.

Research contributors

Jarrod Brumm
Senior Digital Transformation Consultant

Jacques Lirette
President, Ditech Testing

3 anonymous contributors

Info-Tech Research Group Experts

Allison Kinnaird, Research Director & Research Lead
Frank Trovato, Research Director

Define the Role of Project Management in Agile and Product-Centric Delivery

Projects and products are not mutually exclusive.

Table of Contents

3 Analyst Perspective

4 Executive Summary

7 Step 1.1: Clarify How You Want to Talk About Projects and Products

13 Step 1.2: Align Project Management and Agility

16 Step 1.3: Specify the Different Activities for Project Management

20 Step 1.4: Identify Key Differences in Funding of Products Instead of Projects

25 Where Do I Go Next?

26 Bibliography

Analyst Perspective

Project management still has an important role to play!

When moving to more product-centric delivery practices, many assume that projects are no longer necessary. That isn’t necessarily the case!

Product delivery can mean different things to different organizations, and in many cases it can involve the need to maintain both projects and project delivery.

Projects are a necessary vehicle in many organizations to drive value delivery, and the activities performed by project managers still need to be done by someone. It is the form and who is involved that will change the most.

Ari Glaizel Practice Lead, Applications Delivery and Management Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to product delivery. For many organizations product delivery requires detailed project management practices, while for others it requires much less. Taking an outcome-first approach when planning your product transformation is critical to make the right decision on the balance between project and product management.

Your evolution of delivery practice is not a binary switch

1. PROJECTS WITH WATERFALL The project manager is accountable for delivery of the project, and the project manager owns resources and scope.
2. PROJECTS WITH AGILE DELIVERY A transitional state where the product owner is accountable for feature delivery and the project manager accountable for the overall project.
3. PRODUCTS WITH AGILE PROJECT AND OPERATIONAL DELIVERY The product owner is accountable for the delivery of the project and products, and the project manager plays a role of facilitator and enabler.
4. PRODUCTS WITH AGILE DELIVERY Delivery of products can happen without necessarily having projects. However, projects could be instantiated to cover major initiatives.

Info-Tech Insight

• Organizations do not need to go to full product and Agile delivery to improve delivery practices! Every organization needs to make its own determination on how far it needs to go. You can do it in one step or take each step and evaluate how well you are delivering against your goals and objectives.
• Many organizations will go to Products With Agile Project and Operational Delivery, and some will go to Products With Agile Delivery.

Activities to undertake as you transition to product-centric delivery

1. PROJECTS WITH WATERFALL
   • Clarify how you want to talk about projects and products. The center of the conversation will start to change.
2. PROJECTS WITH AGILE DELIVERY
   • Align project management and agility. They are not mutually exclusive (but not necessarily always aligned).
3. PRODUCTS WITH AGILE PROJECT AND OPERATIONAL DELIVERY
   • Specify the different activities for project management. As you mature your product practices, project management becomes a facilitator and collaborator.
4. PRODUCTS WITH AGILE DELIVERY
   • Identify key differences in funding. Delivering products instead of projects requires a change in the focus of your funding.

Step 1.1

Clarify How You Want to Talk About Projects and Products

Activities

• 1.1.1 Define “product” and “project” in your context
• 1.1.2 Brainstorm potential changes in the role of projects as you become Agile and product-centric

This step involves the following participants:

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Business analysts

Outcomes of this step

• An understanding of how the role can change through the evolution from project to more product-centric practices

Definition of terms

Project “A temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. The temporary nature of projects indicates a beginning and an end to the project work or a phase of the project work. Projects can stand alone or be part of a program or portfolio.” (PMBOK, PMI)

Product “A tangible solution, tool, or service (physical or digital) that enables the long-term and evolving delivery of value to customers and stakeholders based on business and user requirements.” (Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision, Info-Tech Research Group)

Info-Tech InsightLet these definitions be a guide, not necessarily to be taken verbatim. You need to define these terms in your context based on your particular needs and objectives. The only caveat is to be consistent with your usage of these terms in your organization.

1.1.1 Define “product” and “project” in your context

Output: Your enterprise/organizational definition of products and projects

Participants: Executives, Product/project managers, Applications teams

1. Discuss what “product” and “project” mean in your organization.
2. Create common, enterprise-wide definitions for “product” and “project.”

Agile and product management does not mean projects go away

Projects Within Products

Regardless of whether you recognize yourself as a “product-based” or “project-based” shop, the same basic principles should apply.

You go through a period or periods of project-like development to build or implement a version of an application or product.

You also have parallel services along with your project development that encompass the more product-based view. These may range from basic support and maintenance to full-fledged strategy teams or services like sales and marketing.

Info-Tech Note

As your product transformation continues, projects can become optional and needed only as part of your organization’s overall delivery processes

Identify the differences between a project-centric and a product-centric organization

Info-Tech Insight

Product delivery requires significant shifts in the way you complete development and implementation work and deliver value to your users. Make the changes that support improving end-user value and enterprise alignment.

1.1.2 Brainstorm potential changes in the role of projects as you become Agile and product-centric

5-10 minutes

Output: Increased appreciation of the relationship between project and product delivery

Participants: Executives, Product/project managers, Applications teams

• Discuss as a group:
  • What stands out in the evolution from project to product?
  • What concerns do you have with the change?
  • What will remain the same?
  • Which changes feel the most impactful?
  

Step 1.2

Align Project Management and Agility

Activities

• 1.2.1 Explore gaps in Agile/product-centric delivery of projects

This step involves the following participants:

• Executives
• Product/Project managers
• Applications teams

Outcomes of this step

• A clearer view of how agility can be introduced into projects.

Challenges with the project management role in Agile and product-centric organizations

Many project managers feel left out in the cold. That should not be the case!

In product-centric, Agile teams, many roles that a project manager previously performed are now taken care of to different degrees by the product owner, delivery team, and process manager.

The overall change alters the role of project management from one that orchestrates all activities to one that supports, monitors, and escalates.

Product Owner

• Defines the “what” and heavily involved in the “when” and the “why”
• Accountable for delivery of value

Delivery team members

• Define the “how”
• Accountable for building and delivering high-quality deliverables
• Can include roles like user experience, interaction design, business analysis, architecture

Process Manager

• Facilitates the other teams to ensure valuable delivery
• Can potentially, in a Scrum environment, play the scrum master role, which involves leading scrums, retrospectives, and sprint reviews and working to resolve team issues and impediments
• Evolves into more of a facilitator and communicator role

1.2.1 Explore gaps in Agile/ product-centric delivery of projects

5-10 minutes

Output: An assessment of what is in the way to effectively deliver on Agile and product-focused projects

Participants: Executives, Product/project managers, Applications teams

• Discuss as a group:
  • What project management activities do you see in Agile/product roles?
  • What gaps do you see?
  • How can project management help Agile/product teams be successful?

Step 1.3

Specify the Different Activities for Project Management

Activities

• 1.3.1 Articulate the changes in a project manager’s role

This step involves the following participants:

• Executives
• Product/Project managers
• Applications teams

Outcomes of this step

• An understanding of the role of project management in an Agile and product context

Kicking off the project

Product-centric delivery still requires key activities to successfully deliver value. Where project managers get their information from does change.

Project Charter Project managers should still define a charter and capture the vision and scope. The vision and high-level scope is primarily defined by the product owner. Key Stakeholders and Communication Clearly defining stakeholders and communication needs is still important. However, they are defined based on significant input and cues by the product owner. Standardizing on Tools and Processes To ensure consistency across projects, project managers will want to align tools to how the team manages their backlog and workflow. This will smooth communication about status with stakeholders.

Info-Tech Insight

1. Product management plays a similar role to the one that was traditionally filled by the project sponsor except for a personal accountability to the product beyond the life of the project.
2. When fully transitioned to product-centric delivery, these activities could be replaced by a product canvas. See Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision for more information.

During the project: Three key activities

The role of project management evolves from a position of ownership to a position of communication, collaboration, and coordination.

Support Communicate Agile/product team needs to leadership Liaise and co-ordinate for non-Agile/product-focused parts of the organization Coach members of the team Monitoring Regular status updates to PMO still required Metrics aligned with Agile/product practices Leverage similar tooling and approaches to what is done locally on Agile/product teams (if possible) Escalation Still a key escalation point for roadblocks that go outside the product teams Collaborate closely with Agile/product team leadership and scrum masters (if applicable)

1.3.1: Articulate the changes in a project manager’s role

5-10 minutes

Output: Current understanding of the role of project management in Agile/product delivery

Participants: Executives, Product/project managers, Applications teams

Why is this important?

Project managers still have a role to play in Agile projects and products. Agreeing to what they should be doing is critical to successfully moving to a product-centric approach to delivery.

• Review how Info-Tech views the role of project management at project initiation and during the project.
• Review the state of your Agile and product transformation, paying special attention to who performs which roles.
• Discuss as a group:
  • What are the current activities of project managers in your organization?
  • Based on how you see delivery practices evolving, what do you see as the new role of project managers when it comes to Agile-centric and product-centric delivery.

Step 1.4

Identify Key Differences in Funding of Products Instead of Projects

Activities

• 1.4.1 Discuss traditional versus product-centric funding methods

This step involves the following participants:

• Executives
• Product owners
• Product managers
• Project managers
• Delivery managers

Outcomes of this step

• Identified differences in funding of products instead of projects

Planning and budgeting for products and families

Reward for delivering outcomes, not features

Autonomy Fund what delivers value Fund long-lived delivery of value through products (not projects). Give autonomy to the team to decide exactly what to build.

Flexibility Allocate iteratively Allocate to a pool based on higher-level business case. Provide funds in smaller amounts to different product teams and initiatives based on need.

Accountability Measure and adjust Product teams define metrics that contribute to given outcomes. Track progress and allocate more (or less) funds as appropriate.

Info-Tech Insight Changes to funding require changes to product and Agile practices to ensure product ownership and accountability.

(Adapted from Bain & Company)

Budgeting approaches must evolve as you mature your product operating environment

Info-Tech Insight

As you evolve your approach to product delivery, you will be decoupling the expected benefits, forecast, and budget. Managing them independently will improve your ability adapt to change and drive the right outcomes!

1.4.1 Discuss traditional versus product-centric funding methods

Output: Understanding of funding principles and challenges

Participants: Executives, Product owners, Product managers, Project managers, Delivery managers

1. Discuss how projects are currently funded.
2. Review how the Agile/product funding models differ from how you currently operate.
3. What changes do you need to consider to support a product delivery model?
4. For each change, identify the key stakeholders and list at least one action to take.

Case Study

Global Digital Financial Services Company This financial services company looked to drive better results by adopting more product-centric practices. Its projects exhibited: High complexity/strong dependencies between components High implementation effort High clarification/reconciliation (more than two departments involved) Multiple methodologies (Agile/Waterfall/Hybrid) The team recognized they could not get rid of projects entirely, but getting to a level where there was a coordinated delivery between projects and products being implemented is important. Results Moving several initiatives to more product-centric practices allowed for: Delivery within current assigned capacity Limited need for coordination across departments Lower complexity A unified Agile approach to delivery Through balancing the needs of projects and products, there were three key insights about the project management’s role: The role of project management changes depending on the context of the work. There is no one-size-fits-all definition. Project management played a much bigger role when work spanned multiple products and business units. Project management was used as a key coordinator when delivery became complicated and multilayered.

Where Do I Go Next?

Bibliography

Cobb, Chuck. “Are there Project Managers in Agile?” High Impact Project Management, n.d. Web.

Cohn, Mike. “What Is a Product?” Mountain Goat Software, 6 Sept. 2016. Web.

Cobb, Chuck. “Agile Project Manager Job Description.” High Impact Project Management, n.d. Web.

“How do you define a product?” Scrum.org, 4 April 2017. Web.

Johnson, Darren, et al. “How to Plan and Budget for Agile at Scale.” Bain & Company, 8 Oct. 2019. Web.

“Product Definition.” SlideShare, uploaded by Mark Curphey, 25 Feb. 2007. Web.

Project Management Institute. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide). 7th ed., Project Management Institute, 2021.

Schuurman, Robbin. “Scrum Master vs Project Manager – An Overview of the Differences.” Scrum.org, 11 Feb 2020. Web.

Schuurman, Robbin. “Product Owner vs Project Manager.” Scrum.org, 12 March 2020. Web.

Vlaanderen, Kevin. “Towards Agile Product and Portfolio Management.” Academia.edu, 2010. Web.

“What is a Developer in Scrum?” Scrum.org, n.d. Web.

“What is a Scrum Master?” Scrum.org, n.d. Web.

“What is a Product Owner?” Scrum.org, n.d. Web.

Assess Your Readiness to Implement UCaaS

Unified communication as a service (UCaaS) is already here. Find the right solution for your organization, whether it is Teams Phone or another solution.

Analyst Perspective

UCaaS is the solution to the hybrid and remote working world

Hybrid/remote work is a reality and there is little evidence to prove otherwise despite efforts to return employees to the office. A 2023 survey from Zippia says 74% of US companies are planning to or have implemented hybrid work policies. Given the reality of the new ways people work, there’s a genuine need for a UCaaS solution.

The days of on-premises private branch exchange (PBX) and legacy voice over internet protocol (VoIP) solutions are numbered, and organizations are examining alternative solutions to redundant desk phones. The stalwarts of voice solutions, Cisco and Avaya, have seen the writing on the wall for some time: the new norm must be a cloud-based solution that integrates via API with content resource management (CRM), email, chat, and collaboration tools.

Besides remaining agile when accommodating different work locations, it’s advantageous to be able to quickly scale and meet the needs of organizations and their employees. New technology is moving at such a pace that utilizing a UCaaS service is truly beneficial, especially given its AI, analytics, and mobile capabilities. Being held back by an on-premises solution that is capitalized over several years is not a wise option.

John Donovan
Principle Research Director, I&O Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

Insight Summary

Improved integration and communication in a hybrid world
Unified communication as a service (UCaaS) integrates several tools into one platform to provide seamless voice, video, chat, collaboration, sharing and much more. The ability to work from anywhere and the ability to use application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate content resource management (CRM) and other productivity tools into a unified environment is a key component of employee productivity, whether at the office or remote, or even on mobile devices.

Simplify your maintenance, management, and support
Communication and voice using a cloud provisioner has many benefits and makes life easier for your IT staff. No more ongoing maintenance, upgrades, patching and managing servers or private branch exchanges (PBXs). UCaaS is easy to deploy, and due to its scalability and flexibility, users can easily be added or removed. Now businesses can retire their legacy technical debt of voice hardware and old desk phones that clutter the office.

Oversight on security
The utilization of a software as a service (SaaS) platform in UCaaS form does by design risk data breaches, phishing, and third-party malware. Fortunately, you can safeguard your organization’s security by ensuring the vendor you choose features SOC2 certification, taking care of encryption, firewalls, two-factor authentication and security incident handling, and disaster recovery. The big players in the UCaaS world have these features.

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight

Determine your communication and collaboration needs. Evaluate your current use of voice, video, chat, collaboration, sharing, and mobility whether for the office or remote work. Evaluate your security and regulatory requirements and needs. Determine the integration requirements when evaluating top vendors.

The evolution of unified communication

How we moved from fax machines and desk phones to an integrated set of tools on one platform in the cloud

Business drivers for moving to UCaaS

What organizations look to gain or save by moving to UCaaS solutions

Flexibility and scalability
Ability to add/remove users and services as appropriate for changing business needs, allowing for quick adaptation to changing markets.

Productivity
Offering features like messaging, collaboration tools, and video conferencing enables users to be more effective regardless of location and device. May lead to quicker decision making and reduced communication delays.

Cost savings
Eliminating the need for on-premises hardware and software, reducing maintenance and support costs. Predictable monthly billing.

Business continuity
Reducing risks of disruption or disaster. Allowing users to work from anywhere when the physical office is unavailable. Additional features can include disaster recovery and backup services.

Enhanced security
UCaaS providers usually offer advanced security and compliance features including encryption, firewall, intrusion detection, and certifications like HIPAA and SOC 2.

KPIs to demonstrate success

What key metrics should businesses measure to demonstrate a successful UCaaS project?
What improvements are needed?
What can be optimized?

What are the surveys telling us?

Different organizations adopt UCaaS solutions for different reasons

95%

Collaboration: No Jitter’s study on team collaboration found that 95% of survey respondents think collaborative communication apps are a necessary component of a successful communications strategy.
Source: No Jitter, 2018.

95%

Security: When deploying remote communication solutions, 95% of businesses say they want to use VPN connections to keep data private.
Source: Mitel, 2018.

31%

Flexibility: While there are numerous advantages to cloud-based communications, 31% of companies intend to use UCaaS to eliminate technical debt from legacy systems and processes.
Source: Freshworks, 2019.

UCaaS adoption

While many organizations are widely adopting UCaaS, they still have data security concerns

UCaaS deployments are growing

UCaaS is growing at a rate that shows the market for UC is moving toward cloud-based voice and collaboration solutions at a rate of 29% year over year.

Source: Synergy Research Group, 2017.

Security is still a big concern

While it’s increasingly popular to adopt cloud-based unified communication solutions, 70% of those companies are still concerned about their data security.

Source: Masergy, 2022.

Concerns around security range from encrypting conversations to controlling who has access to what data in the organization’s network to how video is managed on emerging video communications platforms.

Info-Tech Insight

Ensure you maintain a robust security posture with your data regardless of where it is being stored. Security breaches can happen at any location.

UCaaS vs. on-premises UC

Main benefits of UCaaS

• Rapid deployment: Cloud hosting provides the ability to deploy quickly.
• Ease of management: It’s no longer necessary for companies to manage communications across multiple platforms and devices.
• Better connection: The communication flow across teams and with customers is faster and easier with phone, messaging, audio and video conferencing available in one place.
• Scalability: Since UCaaS is an on-demand service, companies can scale their communication needs to what’s immediately required at an affordable price.

Info-Tech Insight

There are five reasons you should migrate to UCaaS. They are advanced technology, easily scalable, cost efficiencies, highly available, and security. There are always outliers, but these five criteria are a reliable foundation when assessing a vendor/product.

UCaaS architecture

The 6 primary elements of UCaaS

Unified communications as a service (UCaaS) is a cloud-based subscription service primarily for communication tools such as voice, video, messaging, collaboration, content sharing, and other cloud services over the internet. It uses VoIP to process calls.

The popularity of UCaaS is increasing with the recent trend of users working remotely full or part-time and requiring collaboration tools for their work.

• The main benefit to businesses is the ability to remove on-premises hardware and reduce technical debt.
• Additionally, it removes the need for expensive up-front capital costs and reduces communications costs.
• From a productivity perspective, delivering these services under one platform/service increases effective collaboration and allows instant communication regardless of device or location.

Features available to UCaaS/UC

Must-haves vs. nice-to-haves

Info-Tech Insight

Decide what matters most to the organization when choosing the UC platform and applications. Divide criteria into must-have vs. nice-to-have categories.

Security and UCaaS

• Maintain company integrity
• Enhance data security
• Regulatory compliance
• Reduce risk of fraud
• Protect data for multiple devices

What are the concerns? What is at risk?

• DDoS attacks: Enterprise transactions are paralyzed by flooding of data across the network preventing access
• Phishing: Users are tricked into clicking a URL and sharing an organization’s sensitive data
• Ransomware: Malicious attack preventing the business from accessing data and demanding a ransom for access
• Third-party malware: Software infected with a virus, trojan horse, worms, spyware, or even ransomware with malicious intent

Security solutions in UCaaS

End-to-end encryption is critical

SRTP

• Secure real-time protocol is a cryptographic protocol used to secure voice & video calls over IP networks
• SRTP provides encryption, message authentication, and integrity protection for voice and data packets. Using advanced encryption standard (AES) reduces chance of DDoS attacks

TLS

• Transport layer security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol that secures data in transit over the internet, protecting from interception and tampering

VPNs and firewalls

• Virtual private networks (VPNs) are used to secure and encrypt connections between remote devices and the network. UCaaS providers can use VPN to secure access from remote locations
• Firewalls are your primary line of defense against unauthorized traffic entering or leaving the network

SIP

• Session initiated protocol (SIP) over TLS is used to initiate and terminate video and voice calls over the internet. UCaaS providers often use SIP over TLS to encrypt and secure SIP messages

SSH

• Secure shell (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol used to secure remote access and communications over the network. SSH is often used by UCaaS providers to secure remote management and configuration of systems

Info-Tech Insight

Encryption is a must for securing data and voice packets across the internet. These packets can be vulnerable to eavesdropping techniques and local area network (LAN) breaches. This risk must be mitigated from end to end.

UCaaS

Seven vendors competing with Microsoft’s integrated suite of collaboration tools

Zoom

Best for large meetings and webinars

Key features:

• Virtual meetings up to 300 users, up to 1,000 with enterprise version
• Team chat
• Digital whiteboard
• Phone

RingCentral

Best for project management collaboration tools

Key features:

• Video conferencing up to 200 users
• Chat
• Voice calls
• Video polls and captioning
• Digital whiteboard

Nextiva

Best for CRM support, best-in-class functionality and features

Key features:

• Single dashboard
• Chat
• Cospace collaboration tool
• Templates
• Voice and call pop

GoTo Connect

Best for integration with other business apps

Key features:

• Video conferencing up to 250 participants
• Meeting transcripts
• Dial plan

Dialpad

Best for small companies under 15 users

Key features:

• Video meetings up to 15 participants
• AI transcripts with call summary
• Call controls share screen, switch between devices
• Channel conversations with calendar app

WebEx

Only vendor offering real-time translation & closed captioning

Key features:

• Video meetings up to 200 participants
• Calling features with noise removal, call recording, and transcripts
• Live polling and Q&A

Google Workspace

Best for whole team collaboration for docs and slides

Key features:

• Google meet video
• Collaboration on docs, sheets, and slides
• Google chat and spaces
• Calendars with sync updates with Gmail and auto-reminders

Avaya and Cisco

The major players in the VoIP on-premises PBX world have moved to a cloud experience to compete with Microsoft and other UCaaS players

Avaya offers the OneCloud UC platform. It is one of the last UC vendors to offer on-premises solutions. In a market which is moving to the cloud at a serious pace, Avaya retains a 14% share. It made a strategic partnership with RingCentral in 2019 and in February 2021 they formed a joint venture which is now called Avaya Cloud Office, a UCaaS solution that integrates Avaya’s communication and collaboration solution with the RingCentral cloud platform.

With around 33% of the UC market, Cisco also has a selection of UC products and services for on-premises deployment and the cloud, including WebEx Calling, Jabber, Unity Connections for voice messaging, and Single Number Reach for extensive telephony features.

Both vendors support on-premises and cloud-based solutions for UC.

Services provided by Avaya and Cisco in the UCaaS space

Avaya Cloud Office

• Voice calling: Cloud-based phone system over the internet with call forwarding, call transfer, voice mail, and more
• Video conferencing: Virtual meetings for real-time collaboration, screen sharing, virtual backgrounds, video layout, meeting recording, whiteboarding and annotation, and virtual waiting room
• Messaging: A feature that allows users to send and receive instant messages and SMS text messaging on the same platform
• Collaboration: Work together on documents and projects in real time. File sharing and task management
• Contact center: Manage customer interactions across voice, email, chat, and social media
• Mobile app: Allows users to access communication and collaboration features on smartphones and tablets

Cisco WebEx

• Voice calling: Cisco WebEx calling provides cloud-based phone system over the internet including call forwarding, transfer, and voice mail
• Video conferencing: Features include virtual meeting and real-time collaboration, screen sharing, and virtual backgrounds and layouts, highly scalable to large audiences
• Messaging: Features include chat and SMS
• Collaboration: Allows users to work together on docs and projects in real time, including file sharing and task management
• Contact center: Multiple contact center solutions offered for small, medium, and large enterprises
• Mobile app: Software clients for Jabber on cellphones
• Artificial intelligence: Business insights, automatic transcripts, notes, and highlights to capture the meeting

Service desk and contact center cloud options

INDUSTRY: All industries
SOURCE: Software reviews

What vendors offer and what they don’t

RingCentral integrates with some popular contact centers such as Five 9, Talkdesk and Sharpen. They also have a built-in contact center solution that can be integrated with their messaging and video conferencing tools.

GoToConnect integrates with several leading customer service providers including Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud They also offer a built-in contact center solution with advanced call routing and management features.

WebEx integrates with a variety of contact center and customer service platforms including Five9, Genesys, and ServiceNow.

Dialpad integrates with contact center platforms such as Talkdesk and ServiceNow as well as CRM tools such as Salesforce and HubSpot.

Google Workspace integrates with third-party contact center platforms through their Google Cloud Contact Center AI offering.

SoftwareReviews

UCaaS comparison table

* Some reported issues around sound and voice quality may be due to network
**Limited to certain plans

Differences between UCaaS and CPaaS

Microsoft Teams Phone

UCaaS for Microsoft 365

Consider your approach to the telephony question. Microsoft incorporates telephony functionality with their broader collaboration suite. Other providers do the opposite.

Microsoft’s voice solution

These options allow you to plan for an all-cloud solution, connect to your own carrier, or use a combination of all cloud with a third-party carrier. Caveat: Calling plans must be available in your country or region.

How do you connect with the public switched telephone network (PSTN)?

Microsoft has three options for connecting the phone system to the PSTN:

Calling Plan

• Uses Microsoft's phone system and adds a domestic and international calling plan, which enables worldwide calling but depends on your chosen license
• Since PSTN Calling Plan operates out of Microsoft 365, you are not required to deploy/maintain on-premises hardware
• Customers can connect a supported session border controller (SBC) via direct routing if it’s necessary to operate with third-party PBX analog devices or other voice solutions supported by the SBC
• You can assign your phone numbers directly in the Teams Admin Center

This plan will work for you if:

• There is a calling plan available in your region
• You don’t need to maintain your PSTN carrier
• You want to use Microsoft's managed PSTN
• No SBC is necessary in your organization
• Teams provides all the features your business needs

Operator Connect

• Leverage existing contracts or find a new operator from a selection of participating operators
• Operator-managed infrastructure, your operator manages PSTN calling services and SBC
• Faster, easier deployment, quickly connect to your operator and assign phone numbers directly from Teams Admin Center
• Enhanced support and reliability, operators provide technical support and shared service level agreements
• Customers can connect a supported SBC via Direct Routing for interoperability with third-party PBXs, analog devices, and other third-party voice solution equipment supported by SBC

This plan will work for you if:

• There is no calling plan available in your region
• Your preferred carrier participates in the Microsoft operator connect plan
• You are looking to get a new operator that enables calling in Teams

Direct Routing

• Connect your own supported SBC to Microsoft Phone System directly without needing additional on-premises software
• Use virtually any voice solution carrier with Microsoft Phone System
• Can be configured and managed by customers or by your carrier or partner (ask if your carrier or partner provides this option)
• Configure interoperability between your voice solution equipment (e.g., a third-party PBX and analog devices) and Microsoft Phone System
• Assign phone numbers directly from Teams Admin Center

This plan will work for you if:

• You want to use Teams with Phone System
• You need to retain your current PSTN carrier
• You want to mix routing – some calls are going via Calling Plans, some via your carrier
• You need to interoperate with third-party PBXs and/or equipment such as overhead pagers, analog devices
• Teams has all the features that your organization requires

For more information, go to Microsoft Teams call flows.

Teams phone architecture

Microsoft offers three options that can be deployed based on several factors and questions you must answer.

Microsoft Teams phone considerations when connecting to a PSTN

• Do you want to move on-premises users to the cloud?
• Is Microsoft's PSTN Calling Plan available in your region?
• Is your preferred operator a participant in the Microsoft Operator Connect Program?
• Do you want or need to keep your current voice carrier (e.g., does an existing contract require you to do so)?
• Do you have an existing on-premises legacy PBX that you want or need to keep?
• Does your current legacy PBX offer unique business-critical features?
• Do all/any of your users require features not currently offered in Phone System?

1. Phone System with Calling Plan

All in the cloud for Teams users

Infrastructure requirements:

*List of countries where calling plans are available: aka.ms/callingplans

2. Phone System with own carrier via operator connect

Phone system in the cloud; connectivity to on-premises voice network for Teams users

Infrastructure requirements:

*List of countries where Operator Connect is available: aka.ms/operatorconnect

3. Phone System with own carrier via Direct Routing

Phone system in the cloud; connectivity to on-premises voice network for Teams users

Infrastructure requirements:

*Unless deployed as an option to provide connection to third-party PBX, analog devices, or other voice equipment for users who are on Phone System with Calling Plans

A Metrigy study found that 70% of organizations adopting MS Teams are using direct routing to connect to the PSTN
Note: Complex organizations with varying needs can adopt all three options simultaneously.

Avoid overpurchasing Microsoft telephony

Microsoft telephony products on a page

Pros:

• The complete package: sole-sourcing your environment for simpler management
• Users familiar with Microsoft will only have one place to go for telephony
• You can bring your own provider and manage your own routing, giving you more choice
• This can keep costs down as you do not have to pay for calling plan services
• You can choose your own third-party solution while still taking advantage of the integrations that make Microsoft so attractive as a vendor

Cons:

• The most expensive option of the three
• Less control and limited features compared to other pure-play telephony vendors
• This service requires expertise in managing telephony infrastructure
• Avoiding the cloud may introduce technical debt in the long term
• You will have to manage integrations and deal with limited feature functionality (e.g. you may be able to receive inbound calls but not make outbound calls)

Why does it matter?

Phone System is Microsoft’s answer to the premises-based private branch exchange (PBX) functionality that has traditionally required a large capital expenditure. The cloud-based Phone System, offered with Microsoft’s highest tier of Microsoft/Office 365 licensing, allows Skype/Teams customers access to the following features (among others):

• PSTN telephony (inbound and outbound)
• Auto attendants (a menu system for callers to navigate your company directory)
• Call forwarding, voice mail, and transferring
• Caller ID
• Shared lines
• Common area phones

Phone System, especially the Teams version, is a fully-featured telephony solution that integrates natively with a popular productivity solution. Phone System is worth exploring because many organizations already have Teams licenses.

Key insights

1. Don’t pay twice for the same service (unless you must). If you already have M/O365 E5 customer, Teams telephony can be a great way to save money and streamline your environment.
2. Consider your approach to the telephony question. Microsoft incorporates telephony functionality into a broader collaboration suite. Other providers do the opposite. This reflects their relative strengths.
3. Teams is a platform. You can use it as a front end for other telephone services. This might make sense if you have a preferred cloud PBX provider.

Sources

“Plan your Teams voice solution,” Microsoft, 2022.

“Microsoft Calling Plans for Teams,” Microsoft, 2023.

“Plan Direct Routing,” Microsoft, 2023.

“Cisco vs. Microsoft Cloud Calling—Discussing the Options,” UC Today, 2022.

“Microsoft Teams Phone Systems: 5 Deployment Options in 2020,” AeroCom, 2020.

Contact Center and Teams integration

Three Teams integration options

If you want to use a certified and direct routing solution for Teams Phone, use the Connect model.

If you want to use Azure bots and the Microsoft Graph Communication APIs that enable solution providers to create the Teams app, use the Extend model.

If you want to use the SDK that enables solution providers to embed native Teams experiences in their App, use the Power model (under development).

Teams phone network assessment

Useful tools for Microsoft network testing and Microsoft Teams site assessment

Plan network basics

• Does your network infrastructure have enough capacity? Consider switch ports, wireless access points, and other coverage.
• If you use VLANs and DHCP, are your scopes sized accordingly?
• Evaluate and test network paths from where devices are deployed to Microsoft 365.
• Open the required firewall ports and URLs for Microsoft 365 as per guidance.
• Review and test E911 requirements and configuration for location accuracy and compliance.
• Avoid using a proxy server and optimize media paths for reliability and quality.

What internet speed do I need for Teams calls?

• Microsoft Teams uses about 1.2 Mbps for HD video calling (720p), 1.5 Mbps for 1080p, 500 kbps for standard quality video (360p). Group video requires about 1 Mbps, HD group video uses about 2 Mbps.

Key physical considerations

• Power: Do you have enough electrical outlets? If the device needs an external power source, how close can you position it to an outlet?
• Device placement: Where will your device be located? Review desk stands, wall mounts, and other accessories from the original equipment manufacturer (OEM).
• Security: Does your device need to be locked in certain spaces?
• Accessibility: Does the device meet the accessibility requirements of its primary user? Consider where it's placed, wire length, and handset or headset usability.

Prepare your organization's network for Microsoft Teams

• Network/Bandwidth requirements: You can probably put together something from these network requirements from Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/prepare-network

Plan your Teams voice solution

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/cloud-voice-landing-page

Check your internet connection for Teams Phone System

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/business-voice/get-ready-internet
• Microsoft 365 network connectivity test (office.com)
• https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=103017

Teams Phone Mobile

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/operator-connect-mobile-plan

UCaaS Activity

Questions that must be addressed by your business and the vendor. Site surveys and questionnaires for your assessment

Activity: Questionnaire

Input: Evaluate your current state, Network readiness
Output: Decisions on readiness, Gaps in infrastructure readiness, Develop a project plan
Materials: UCaaS Readiness Questionnaire
Participants: Infrastructure Manager, Project Manager, Network Engineer, Voice Engineer

As a group, read through the questions on Tabs 1 and 2 of the UCaaS Readiness Questionnaire workbook. The answers to the questions will determine if you have gaps to fill when determining your readiness to move forward on a UCaaS solution.

You may produce additional questions during the session that pertain to your specific business and situation. Please add them to the questionnaire as needed.

Record your answers to determine next steps and readiness.

When assessing potential vendors, use Tab 3 to determine suitability for your organization and requirements. This section may be left to a later date when building a request for proposal (RFP).

Call #1: Review client advisory deck and next steps.

Call #2: Assess readiness from answers to the Tab 1 questions.

Download the UCaaS Readiness Questionnaire here

Critical Path – Teams with Phone System Deployment

Example Ltd.’s Communications Guide

[Insert Organization Name]’s Communications Guide

Related Info-Tech Research

Bibliography

“8 Security Considerations for UCaaS.” Tech Guidance, Feb. 2022. Accessed March 2023.

“2022 UCaaS & CCaaS market trends snapshot.” Masergy, 2022. Web.

“All-in-one cloud communications.” Avaya, 2023. Accessed April 2023. Web.

Carter, Rebekah. “UC Case Study in Focus: Microsoft Teams and GroupM.” UC Today, 9 May 2022. Accessed Feb. 2023.

“Cisco Unified Communications Manager Cloud (Cisco UCM Cloud) Data Sheet.” Cisco, 15 Sept. 2021. Accessed Jan. 2023.

“Cloud Adoption as Viewed by European Companies: Assessing the Impact on Public, Hybrid and Private Cloud Communications.” Mitel, 2018. Web.

De Guzman, Marianne. “Unified Communications Security: The Importance of UCaaS Encryption.” Fit Small Business, 13 Dec. 2022. Accessed March 2023.

“Evolution of Unified Communications.” TrueConf, n.d. Accessed March 2023. Web.

Froehlich, Andrew. “Choose between Microsoft Teams vs. Zoom for conference needs.” TechTarget, 7 May 2021. Accessed March 2023.

Gerwig, Kate. “UCaaS explained: Guide to unified communications as a service.” TechTarget, 29 March 2022. Accessed Jan. 2023.

Irei, Alissa. “Emerging UCaaS trends include workflow integrations and AI.” TechTarget, 21 Feb 2020. Accessed Feb. 2023.

Kuch, Mike. “What Is Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)?” Avaya, 27 Dec. 2022. Accessed Jan. 2023.

Lazar, Irwin. “UC vendors extend mobile telephony capabilities.” TechTarget, 10 Feb. 2023. Accessed Mar 2023.

McCain, Abby. "30 Essential Hybrid Work Statistics [2023]: The Future of Work." Zippia, 20 Feb. 2023. Accessed Mar 2023.

“Meet the modern CIO: What CEOs expect from their IT leaders.” Freshworks, 2019. Web.

“A New Era of Workplace Communications: Will You Lead or Be Left Behind.” No Jitter, 2018. Web.

Plumley, Mike, et al. “Microsoft Teams IT architecture and voice solutions posters.’” Microsoft Teams, Microsoft, 14 Feb. 2023. Accessed March 2023.

Rowe, Carolyn, et al. “Plan your Teams voice solution” Microsoft Learn, Microsoft, 1 Oct. 2022.

Rowe, Carolyn, et al. “Microsoft Calling Plans for Teams.” Microsoft Learn, Microsoft, 23 May 2023.

Rowe, Carolyn, et al. “Plan Direct Routing.” Microsoft Learn, Microsoft, 20 Feb. 2023.

Scott, Rob. “Cisco vs. Microsoft Cloud Calling—Discussing the Options,” UC Today, 21 April 2022.

Smith, Mike. “Microsoft Teams Phone Systems: 5 Deployment Options in 2020.” YouTube, uploaded by AeroCom Inc, 23 Oct. 2020.

“UCaaS - Getting Started With Unified Communications As A Service.” Cloudscape, 10 Nov. 2022. Accessed March 2023.

“UCaaS Market Accelerating 29% per year; RingCentral, 8x8, Mitel, BroadSoft and Vonage Lead.” Synergy Research Group, 16 Oct. 2017. Web.

“UCaaS Statistics – The Future of Remote Work.” UC Today, 21 April 2022. Accessed Feb. 2023.

“Workplace Collaboration: 2021-22.” Metrigy, 27 Jan. 2021. Web.

INFO-TECH RESEARCH GROUP

Analyze Your Service Desk Ticket Data

Take a data-driven approach to service desk optimization.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst Perspective

Benedict Chang Research Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations Info-Tech Research Group

Ken Weston ITIL MP, PMP, Cert.APM, SMC Research Director, Infrastructure & Operations Info-Tech Research Group

The perfect time to start analyzing your ticket data is now

Service desks improve their services by leveraging ticket data to inform their actions. However, many organizations don’t know where to start. It’s tempting to wait for perfect data, but there’s a lot of value in analyzing your ticket data as it exists today.

Start small. Track key tension metrics based on the out-of-the-box functionality in your tool. Review the metrics regularly to stay on track.

By reviewing your ticket data, you’re going to get better organically. You’re going to learn about the state of your environment, the health of your processes, and the quality of your services. Regularly analyze your data to drive improvements.

Make ticket analysis a weekly habit. Every week, you should be evaluating how the past week went. Every month, you should be looking for patterns and trends.

Executive Summary

Your Situation

Leverage your service desk ticket data to gain insights for improving your operations:

1. Use a data-based approach to allocate service desk resources.
2. Design appropriate SLOs and SLAs to better service end users.
3. Gain efficiencies for your shift-left strategy.
4. Communicate the current and future value of the service desk to the business.

Common Obstacles

Properly analyzing ticket data is challenging for the following reasons:

• Poor ticket hygiene and unclear ticket handling guidelines can lead to untrustworthy results.
• Undocumented tickets from various intake channels prevents you from seeing the whole picture.
• Service desk personnel are not sure where to start with analysis and are too busy to find time.
• Too many metrics are tracked to parse actionable insights from the noise.

Info-Tech’s Approach

Info-Tech’s approach to improvement:

• To reduce the noise, standardize your ticket data in a format that will ease analysis.
• Start with common analyses using the cleaned data set.
• Identify action items based on your ticket data.

Analyze your ticket data to help continually improve your service desk.

Slow down. Give yourself time.

Give yourself time to observe the new metrics and draw enough insights to make recommendations for improvement. Then, execute on those recommendations. Slow and steady improvement of the service desk only adds business value and will have a positive impact on customer satisfaction.

Your challenge

This research is designed to help service desk managers analyze their ticket data

Analyzing ticket data involves:

• Collecting ticket data and keeping it clean. Based on the metrics you’re analyzing, define ticket expectations and keep the data up to date.
• Showing the value of the service desk. SLAs are meaningless if they are not met consistently. The prerequisite to implementing proper SLAs is fully understanding the workload of the service desk.
• Understanding – and improving – the user experience. You cannot improve the user experience without meaningful metrics that allow you to understand the user experience. Different user groups will have different needs and different expectations of the level of service. Your metrics should reflect those needs and expectations.

36% of organizations are prioritizing ticket handling in IT for 2021 (Source: SDI, 2021)

12% of organizations are focusing directly on service desk improvement (Source: SDI, 2021)

Common obstacles

Many organizations face these barriers to analyzing their ticket data:

• Finding time to properly analyze ticket data is a challenge. Not knowing where to start can lead to not analyzing the proper data. Service desks end up either tracking too much data or not tracking the proper metrics.
• Data, even if clean, can be housed in various tools and databases. It’s difficult to aggregate data if the data is stored throughout various tools. Comparisons may also be difficult if the data sets aren’t consistent.
• Shifting left to move tickets toward self-service is difficult when there is no visibility into which tickets should be shifted left.

What your peers are saying about why they can’t start analyzing their ticket data:

• “My technicians do not consistently update and close tickets.”
• “My ITSM doesn’t have the capabilities I need to make informed decisions on shifting tickets left.”
• “My tickets are always missing data”
• “I’m constantly firefighting. I have no time for ticket data analysis.”
• “I have no idea where to start with the amount of data I have.”

Common obstacles that prevent effective ticket analysis

We asked IT service desk managers and teams about their biggest hurdles

Info-Tech’s approach

Repeat this analysis every business cycle:

• Gather Your Data
  Collect your ticket data OR start measuring the right metrics.
• Extract & Analyze
  Organize and visualize your data to extract insights
• Action the Results
  Implement low-effort improvements and celebrate quick successes.
• Implement Larger Changes
  Reference your ticket data while implementing process, tooling, and other changes.
• Communicate the Results
  Use your data to show the value of your effort.

Measure the value of this blueprint

Track these metrics as you improve

Use the data to tell you which aspects of IT need to be shifted left and which need to be automated

Your data will show you where you can improve.

As you act on your data, you should see:

• Lower costs per ticket
• Decreased average time to resolve
• Increased end-user satisfaction
• Fewer tickets escalated beyond Tier 1

See Info-Tech’s blueprint Optimize the Service Desk With a Shift-Left Strategy.

Info-Tech’s methodology for analyzing service desk tickets

Insight summary

Slow down. Give yourself time.

Give yourself time to observe the new metrics and draw enough insights to make recommendations for improvement. Then, execute on those recommendations. Slow and steady improvement of the service desk only adds business value and will have a positive impact on customer satisfaction.

Iterate on what to track rather than trying to get it right the first time.

Tracking the right data in your ticket can be challenging if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Start with standardized fields and iterate on your data analysis to figure out your gaps and needs.

If you don’t know where to go, ticket data can point you in the right direction.

If you have service desk challenges, you will need to allocate time to process improvement. However, prioritizing your initiatives is easier if you have the ticket data to point you in the right direction.

Start with data from one business cycle.

Service desks don’t need three years’ worth of data. Focus on gathering data for one business cycle (e.g. three months). That will give you enough information to start generating value.

Let the data do the talking.

Leverage the data to drive organizational and process change in your organization by tracking meaningful metrics. Choose those metrics using business-aligned goals.

Paint the whole picture.

Single metrics in isolation, even if measured over time, may not tell the whole story. Make sure you design tension metrics where necessary to get a holistic view of your service desk.

Blueprint deliverables

Blueprint benefits

IT Benefits

• Discover and implement the proper metrics to improve your service desk
• Use a data-based approach to improve your customer service and operational goals
• Increase visibility with the business and other IT departments using a structured presentation

Business Benefits

• Quicker resolutions to incidents and service requests
• Better expectations for the service desk and IT
• Better visibility into the current state, challenges, and goals of the service desk
• More effective support when contacting the service desk

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Guided Implementation

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is 3-4 calls over the course of 2-3 months.

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

Phase 1

• Call #1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges. Enter your data into the tool.

Phase 2

• Call #2: Assess the current state across the different dashboards.

Phase 3

• Call #3: Identify improvements and insights to include in the communication report.
• Call #4: Review the service desk ticket analysis report.

PHASE 1

Import Your Ticket Data

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• 1.1.1 Define your objectives for analyzing ticket data
• 1.1.2 Identify success metrics
• 1.1.3 Import your ticket data into the tool
• 1.1.4 Update your ticket fields for future analysis

This phase involves the following participants:

• Service Desk Manager
• ITSM Manager
• Service Desk Technician

1.1.1 Define your objectives for analyzing ticket data

Input: Understanding of current service desk process and ticket routing

Output: Defined objectives for the project

Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Ticket Analysis Report

Participants: Service Desk Staff, Service Desk Manager, IT Director, CIO

Use the discussion questions below as a guide

1. Identify your main objective for analyzing ticket data. Use these three sample objectives as a starting point:
   • Demonstrate value to the business by improving customer service.
   • Improve service desk operations.
   • Reduce the number of recurring incidents.
2. Answer the following questions as a group:
   • What challenges do you have getting accurate data for this objective?
   • What data is missing for supporting this objective?
   • What kind of issues must be solved for us to make progress on achieving this objective?
   • What decisions are held up from a lack of data?
   • How can better ticket data help us to more effectively manage our services and operations?

Document in the Ticket Analysis Report.

1.1.2 Identify success metrics

Select metrics that will track your progress on meeting the objective identified in Activity 1.1.1.

Input: Understanding of current service desk process and ticket routing

Output: Defined objectives for the project

Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Ticket Analysis Report

Participants: Service Desk Manager, IT Director, CIO

Use these sample metrics as a starting point:

Document in the Ticket Analysis Report.

Inefficient ticket-handling processes lead to SLA breaches and unplanned downtime

Analyze the ticket data to catch mismanaged or lost tickets that lead to unnecessary escalations and impact business profitability

• Ticket Category – Are your tickets categorized by type of asset? By service?
• Average Ticket Times – How long does it take to resolve or fulfill tickets?
• Ticket Priority – What is the impact and urgency of the ticket?
• SLA/OLA Violations – Did we meet our SLA objectives? If not, why?
• Ticket Channel – How was the issue reported or ticket received?
• Response and Fulfillment – Did we complete first contact resolution? How many times was it transferred?
• Associated Tasks and Tickets – Is this incident associated with any other tasks like change tickets or problem tickets?

Encourage proper ticket-handling procedures to enable data quality

Ensure everyone understands the expectations and the value created from having ticket data that follows these expectations

• Create and update tickets, but not at the expense of good customer service. Agents can start the ticket but shouldn’t spend five minutes creating the ticket when they should be troubleshooting the problem.
• Update the ticket when the issue is resolved or needs to be escalated. If agents are escalating, they should make sure all relevant information is passed along within the ticket to the next technician.
• Update user of ETA if issue cannot be resolved quickly.
• Ticket templates for common incidents can lead to fast creation, data input, and categorizations. Templates can reduce the time it takes to create tickets from two minutes to 30 seconds.
• Update categories to reflect the actual issue and resolution.
• Reference or link to the knowledgebase article as the documented steps taken to resolve the incident.
• Validate with the client that the incident is resolved; automate this process with ticket closure after a certain time.
• Close or resolve the ticket on time.

Info-Tech Insight

Ticket handling ensures clean handovers, whether it is to higher tiers or back to the customer. When filling the ticket out with information intended for another party, ensure the information is written for their benefit and from their point of view.

Service Desk Ticket Analysis Tool overview

The Service Desk Ticket Analysis Tool will help you standardize your ticket data in a meaningful format that will allow you to apply common analyses to identify the actions you need to take to improve service desk operations

TABS 1 & 2 INSTRUCTIONS & DATA ENTRY	TAB 3 : TICKET SUMMARY TICKET SUMMARY DASHBOARDS	TABS 4 to 8: DASHBOARDS INCIDENT SERVICE REQUEST CATEGORY
Input at least three months of your exported ticket data into the corresponding columns in the tool to feed into the common analysis graphs in the other tabs.	This tab contains multiple dashboards analyzing how tickets come in, who requests them, who resolves them, and how long it takes to resolve them.	These tabs each have dashboards outlining analysis on incidents and service requests. The category tab will allow you to dive deeper on commonly reported issues.

1.1.3 Import your data into our Service Desk Ticket Analysis Tool

You can still leverage your current data, but use this opportunity to improve your service desk ticket fields down the line

Input: ITSM data log

Output: Populated Service Desk Ticket Data Analysis Tool

Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Service Desk Ticket Analysis Tool

Participants: Service Desk Manager, Service Desk Technicians

Start here:

• Extract your ticket data from your ITSM tool in an Excel or text format.
• Look at the fields on the data entry tab of the Service Desk Ticket Analysis Tool.
• Fill the fields with your ticket data by copying and pasting relevant sections. It is okay if you don’t have all the fields, but take note of the fields you are missing.
• With the list of the fields you are missing, run through the following activity to decide if you will need to adopt or add fields to your own service desk ticket tool.

When entering your data, pay close attention to the following fields:

• Time to Resolve: This is automatically calculated using data in the Open Date, Open Time, Close Date, and Close Time fields. You have three options for entering your data in these fields:
  1. Enter your data as the fields describe. Ensure your data contain only the field description (e.g. Open Date separated from Open Time). If your data contain Open Date AND Open Time, Excel will not show both.
  2. Enter your data only in Open Date and Close Date. If your ITSM does not separate date and time, you can keep the data in a single cell and enter it in the column. The formula in Time to Resolve will still be accurate.
  3. If your ITSM outputs Time to Resolve, overwrite the formula in the Time to Resolve column.
• SLA: If your ITSM outputs SLA fulfilled: Y/N, enter that directly into the SLA Fulfilled column.
• Blank Columns: If you do not have data for all the columns, that is okay. Continue with the following activity. Note that some stock dashboards will be empty if that is the case.
• Incidents vs. Service Requests: If you separate incidents and service requests, be sure to capture that in the SR/Incident for Tabs 4 and 5. If you do not separate the two, then you will only need to analyze Tab 3.

Use Info-Tech’s tool instead of building your own. Download the Service Desk Ticket Analysis Tool.

1.1.4 Update your ticket fields for future analysis

Input: Populated Service Desk Ticket Data Analysis Tool

Output: New ticket fields to track

Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Service Desk Ticket Analysis Tool

Participants: Service Desk Manager, Service Desk Technicians

As a group, pay attention to the ticket fields populated in the tool as well as the ticket fields that you were not able to populate. Use the example “Fields Captured” table to the right, which lists all fields present in the ticket analysis tool.

Discuss the following questions:

1. Consider the fields not captured. Would it be valuable to start capturing that data for future analysis?
2. If so, does your ITSM support that field?
3. Can you make the change in-house or do you have to bring in an external ITSM administrator to make the change?
4. Capture the results in the Ticket Analysis Report.

Document in the Ticket Analysis Report.

Info-Tech Insight

Don’t wait for your ticket quality to be perfect. You can still draw actions from your ticket data. They will likely be process improvements initially, but the exercise of pulling the data is a necessary first step.

Common ticket fields tracked by your peers

Which of these metrics do you track and action?

• Remember you don’t have to track every metric. Only track metrics that are actionable.

For each metric that you end up tracking:

• Look for trends over time.
• Brainstorm reasons why the metric could rise or fall.

Associate a metric with each improvement you execute.

• Performing this step will allow you to better see the value from your team’s efforts.
• It will also give you a quicker response than waiting for spikes in your data.

(Source: Info-Tech survey, 2021; N=20)

PHASE 2

Analyze Your Ticket Data

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• 2.1.1 Review high-level ticket dashboards
• 2.2.1 Review incident, service request, and ticket category dashboards

This phase involves the following participants:

• Service Desk Manager
• Service Desk Technicians
• IT Managers

Visualize your ticket data as a first step to analysis

Identifying trends is easier when looking at diagrams, graphs, and figures

Start your analysis with common visuals employed by other service desk professionals

• Phase 2 will walk you through visualizing your data to get a better understanding of your ticket intake, incident management, and service request management.
• Each step will walk you through:
  • Common visualizations used by service desks
  • Patterns to look for in your visualizations
  • Actions to take to address negative patterns and to continue positive trends
• Share diagrams that underscore both the value being provided by the service desk as well as the scope of the pain points. Use Info-Tech’s Ticket Analysis Report template as a starting point.

“Being able to tell stories with data is a skill that’s becoming ever more important in our world of increasing data and desire for data-driven decision making. An effective data visualization can mean the difference between success and failure when it comes to communicating the findings of your study, raising money for your nonprofit, presenting to your board, or simply getting your point across to your audience.” - Cole Knaflic, Founder and CEO, Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals

Use the detailed dashboards to determine the next steps for improvement

A single number doesn’t tell the whole picture

Analyze trends over time:

• Analyze trends by day, by week, by month, and by year to determine:
  • When are the busy periods? (E.g. Do tickets tend to spike every morning, every Monday, or every September?)
  • When are the slow periods? (E.g. Do tickets drop at the end of the day, at midday, on Fridays, or over the summer?)
• Are spikes or drops in volume consistent trends or one-time anomalies?

Then build a plan to address them:

• How will you handle volume spikes, if they’re consistent?
• What can your resources work on during slow times, if they are consistent?
• If you assume no shrinkage, can you handle the peaks in volume if you make all FTEs available to work on tickets at a certain time of day?

Look for seasonal trends. In this example, we see high ticket volumes in May and January, with lower ticket volumes in June and July when many staff are taking holidays. However, also be careful to look at the big picture of how you pulled the data. August through October sees a high volume of open tickets because the data set is pulled in November, not because there’s a seasonal spike on tickets not closing at the end of the fiscal year.

Track ticket data over time

Make low-effort adjustments before major changes

Don’t rush to a decision based off the first numbers you see

Review ticket summary dashboard

Ideally, you should track ticket patterns over an entire year to get a full sense of trends within each month of the year. At minimum, track for 30 days, then 60, then 90, and see if anything changes. The longer you can track ticket patterns, the more accurate your picture will be.

Review additional dashboards

If you separate incidents and service requests, and you have accurate ticket categories, then you can use these dashboards to further break down the data to identify ticket trends.

The output of the ticket analysis will only be as accurate as its input.
To get the most accurate results, first ensure your data is accurate, then analyze it over as much time as possible. Aggregating with accurate data will give you a better picture of the trends in demand that your service desk sees.

Not separating incidents and service requests? Need to fix your ticket categories? Visit Standardize the Service Desk to get started.

Analyze incidents and requests separately

Each type has its own set of customer experiences and expectations

• Different ticket types are associated with radically different prioritization, routing, and service levels. For instance, most incidents are resolved within a business day, but requests take longer to implement.
• If you fail to distinguish between ticket types, your metrics will obscure service desk performance.
• From a ticket analysis standpoint, separating ticket types prior to analysis or, better yet, at intake allows for cleaner data. In turn, this means more structured analyses, better insights, and more meaningful actions. Not separating ticket types may still get you to the same conclusions, but it will be much more difficult to sift through the data.

Incident

An unanticipated interruption of a service.
The goal of incident management is to restore the service as soon as possible, even if the resolution involves a workaround.

Request

A generic description for a small change or service access.
Requests are small, frequent, and low risk. They are best handled by a process distinct from incident, change, and project management.

Not separating incidents and service requests? Need to fix your ticket categories? Visit Standardize the Service Desk to get started.

Step 2.1

Analyze Your High-Level Ticket Data

Dashboards

• Ticket Volume
• Ticket Intake
• Ticket Handling and Resolution
• Ticket Categorization

This step will walk you through the following activities:

Visualize the current state of your service desk.

This step involves the following participants:

• Service Desk Manager
• Service Desk Technicians
• IT Managers

Outcomes of this step

Build your metrics baseline to compare with future metric results.

Dashboards: Ticket Volume

Analyze your data for insights

• Analyze volume trends by day, by week, by month, and by year to determine:
  • When are the busy periods? (E.g. Do tickets tend to spike every morning, every Monday, or every September?)
  • When are slow periods? (E.g. Do tickets drop at the end of the day, at midday, on Fridays, or over the summer?)
• Are spikes or drops in volume consistent trends or one-time anomalies?
• What can your resources be working on during slow times? Are you able to address ticket backlog?

Dashboards: Ticket Intake

Analyze your data for insights

• Determine how to drive intake to the most appropriate solution for your organization:
  • A web portal is the most efficient intake method, but it must be user friendly to increase its adoption.
  • The phone should be available for urgent requests or incidents. Encourage those who call with a request to submit a ticket through the portal.
  • Discourage use of email if it is unstructured, as users don’t provide enough detail, and often two or three transactions are required for triage.
  • If walk-ups are encouraged, structure and formalize the support so it can be resourced and managed rather than interrupt-driven.

Dashboard: Ticket Handling and Resolution

Analyze your data for insights

• Look at your ticket load by technician and by tier. This is an essential step to set your baseline to measure your shift-left initiatives. If you are focusing on self-service or Tier 1 training, the ticket load from higher tiers should decrease over time.
• If Tiers 2 and 3 are handling the majority of the tickets, this could be a red flag indicating tickets are inappropriately escalated or Tier 1 could use more training and support.
• For average time to resolve and average time to resolve by tier, are you meeting your SLAs? If not, are your SLAs too aggressive? Are tickets left open and not properly closed?

Dashboard: Ticket Categorization

Analyze your data for insights

• Ticket categorization is critical to clean data. Having a categorization scheme with categories that are miscellaneous, too specific, or too general easily leads to inaccurate reporting or confusing workflows for technicians.
• When looking at your ticket categories, first look for duplicate categories that could be collapsed into one.
• Also look at your top five to seven categories and see if they make sense. Are these good candidates in your organization for automation or shift-left?
• Compare your Tier 1 categories. The level of specificity for these categories should be comparable to easily run reports. If they are not, assess the need for a category redesign.

Step 2.2

Analyze Incidents, Service Requests, and Ticket Categories

Dashboards

• Incidents
• Service Requests
• Volume by Ticket Category
• Resolution Times by Priority and/or Category
• Tabs for More Granular Investigation and Reporting

This step will walk you through the following activities:

Visualize your incident and service request ticket load and analyze trends. Use this information and cross reference data sets to gain a holistic view of how the service desk interacts with IT and the business.

This step involves the following participants:

• Service Desk Manager
• Service Desk Technicians
• IT Managers

Outcomes of this step

Gain actionable, data-driven improvements based on your incident and service request data. Show the value of the service desk and highlight improvements needed.

Incident and Service Requests Dashboard: Priority and SLA

Analyze your data for insights

• Your ticket priority distribution for overall load and time to resolve (TTR) should look something like above with low-priority tickets having higher load and TTR and high/critical-priority tickets having a lower load and lower TTR. If it is reversed, that is a good indication that the service desk is too reactive or isn’t properly prioritizing its work.
• If your SLA has a high failure rate, consider reassessing your targets with SLOs that you can meet before publishing them as achievable SLAs.

Incident and Service Requests Dashboard: Priority and SLA

Analyze your data for insights

• Examine your ticket handling by looking at ticket status and resolution codes.
  • If you have a lot of blanks, then tickets are not properly handled. Consider reinforcing your standards for close codes and statuses.
  • Alternatively, if tickets are left open, you may have to build follow-ups on stale tickets into your process or introduce proper auto-close processes.

Category, Resolution Time, and Resolution Code Dashboards

These PivotCharts allow you to dig deeper

Investigate whether there are trends in ticket volume and resolution times within specific categories and subcategories

Tab 6, Category Dashboard; tab 7, Resolution Time Dashboard; and tab 8, Resolution Code Dashboard are PivotCharts. Use these tabs to investigate whether there are trends in ticket volume, resolution times, and resolution codes within specific categories and subcategories.

Start with the charts that are available. The +/- buttons will allow you to show more granular information. By default, this granularity will be into the levels of the ticket categorization scheme.

For most categorization schemes, there will be too many categories to properly graph. You can apply a filter to investigate specific categories by clicking on the drop-down buttons.

Use these tabs for more granular investigation and reporting

TAB 6 CATEGORY DASHBOARD	TAB 7 RESOLUTION TIME DASHBOARD	TAB 8 RESOLUTION TIME DASHBOARD
Investigate ticket distributions in first, second, and third levels. Are certain categories overcrowded, suggesting they can be split? Are certain categories not being used?	Do average resolution times match your service level agreements? Do certain categories have significantly different resolution times? Are there areas that can benefit from shift-left?	Are resolution codes being accurately used? Are there trends in resolution codes? Are these codes providing sufficient information for problem management?

PHASE 3

Communicate Your Insights

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• 3.1.1 Review common recommendations
• 3.2.1 Review ticket reports daily
• 3.2.2 Incorporate ticket data into retrospectives and team updates
• 3.2.3 Regularly review trends with business leaders
• 3.2.4 Tell a story with your data

This phase involves the following participants:

• Service Desk Manager
• Service Desk Technicians
• IT Managers

Step 3.1

Build Recommendations Based on Your Ticket Data

Activities

• 3.1.1 Review common recommendations

This step will walk you through the following activities:

Review common recommendations as a first step to extracting insights from your own data.

This step involves the following participants:

• Service Desk Manager
• Service Desk Technicians

Outcomes of this step

You will gain an understanding of the common challenges with service desks and ticket analysis in general. See which ones apply to you to inform your ticket data analysis moving forward.

Review these common recommendations

1. Fix your ticket categories
   Organize your ticket categorization scheme for proper routing and reporting.
2. Focus more on self-service
   Self-service is essential to enable shift-left strategies. Focus on knowledgebase processes and portal ease of use.
3. Update your service catalog
   Improve your service catalog, if necessary, to make it easy for end users to request services and for the service desk to provide those services.
4. Direct volume toward other channels
   Walk-ups make it more difficult to properly log tickets and assign service desk resources. Drive volume to other channels to improve your ticket quality.
5. Crosstrain Tier 1 on certain topics
   Tier 1 breadth of knowledge is essential to drive up first contact resolution.
6. Build more automation
   Identify bottlenecks and challenges with your ticket data to streamline ticket handling and resolution.
7. Revisit service level agreements
   Update your SLAs and/or SLOs to prioritize expectation management for your end users.
8. Improve your data quality
   You can only analyze data that exists. Revisit your ticket-handling guidelines and more regularly check tickets to ensure they comply with those standards.