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Aug03
What is Service Delivery Management?
The role of a Service Delivery Manager within the Managed Service Industry and why Service Delivery Management is integral to the services we sell to our customers.
Service Delivery Manager is a role/title that is used in industries ranging from Hospitality to Construction, in fact looking on a well-known internet recruitment site today there were over 10,000 Service Delivery Manager (SDM) roles posted in the past 7 days. Based on this you would expect it to be a role that people are familiar with, but this is not necessarily the case. Frequently our sales teams find the need to explain the SDM role in the context of the IT Managed Service Industry and demonstrate why Service Delivery Management is integral to the services we sell to our customers.
This need to clarify what the Service Delivery Manager does may be born out of the proliferations of roles bearing the same title but not necessarily all adopting the same approach, or in some cases giving a different title to the Service Deliver Management role. As far as SaintGroup is concerned, Service Delivery Management for Managed Services is about maintaining accountability for all the services we provide to the customer. The role is responsible for all Service Support and Service Delivery actions taken, to ensure we meet the customers’ business needs and IT requirements. Ultimately the measure of how effective the Service Delivery is can be gauged by the level of customer satisfaction.
Many Managed Service providers have their own approach to how they achieve the desired deliverables within their Service Delivery function. Within SaintGroup we can broadly categorise the standard activities of our Service Deliver Managers as follows:
1) Monthly service review meetings: Face to Face meetings with the client to analyse Management Information, tailored to show how the service is performing against the services that we are contracted to provide. In this review we typically focus on identifying any trends relating to capacity, availability, incident repetition, and incident volumes to try and identify where changes could be made to the client IT infrastructure, or the way in which we support to increase the performance, availability, or end user satisfaction of the services used.
2) Continual Service Improvement: Each of our Service Managers maintains a Continual Service Improvement Plan, that relates to the customer’s specific support requirements. At the lowest level, this acts as a way of prioritising and tracking simple improvement initiatives such as tweaking process to better suit the customer’s needs, but is equally used to drive technology enhancements and innovations to align to the customers ever evolving business requirements.
3) Internal Review Meetings: To underpin and progress improvement initiatives identified as part of the Continuous Service Improvement process, the SaintGroup Service Delivery Manager holds frequent internal review meetings to ensure that Continual Service Improvements are being progressed
4) Customer Satisfaction: For those customers who elect to opt-in, SaintGroup provide an end user satisfaction service where a user is surveyed upon their call being completed, to gauge their satisfaction with the service received. Our service management teams report on the overall satisfaction levels within the user base, and in conjunction with our customers will use this information to identify areas where we can further improve our service.
5) Change Management: Our service Managers are ITIL qualified, and operate within the type of ITIL based service operation that is commonly adopted throughout the IT support industry. Good Change Management is vital in ensuring the systems availability is kept to a maximum. SaintGroup Service Delivery managers represent their customers in the Change Advisory Board, to ensure that any changes to the customer estate are required, beneficial, and that every eventuality has been considered to minimise service degradation whilst the change takes place.
6) Problem Management: While it is always nice to have incidents resolved quickly, it is far better to prevent them altogether. SaintGroup achieves this through Problem Management. Using call trend analysis we proactively identify repeat issues, and review how to prevent these from re-occurring. Representing the customer in a similar way to the Change Advisory Board, the Service Delivery Manager will attend these meetings and work with the operations teams and the customer, to identify solutions to eliminate the root cause of repeat incidents.
7) Relationship Management: SaintGroup positions our service delivery managers to be the primary conduit between the customer and the Managed Service provided. Therefore if there is a need to escalate an issue, seek clarity, advice, requests a change or amendment to the service, or for any other general query or requirement, then our Service Delivery Managers would act as the primary port of call.
Hopefully this article goes some way to clarifying the value that Service Delivery Management brings to the customer experience, and explains why for SaintGroup, the appointment of an SDM to all of of our Managed Service contracts is essential in providing the level of service that our customers deserve.
Many Managed Service providers have their own approach to how they achieve the desired deliverables within their Service Delivery function. Within SaintGroup we can broadly categorise the standard activities of our Service Deliver Managers as follows:
1) Monthly service review meetings: Face to Face meetings with the client to analyse Management Information, tailored to show how the service is performing against the services that we are contracted to provide. In this review we typically focus on identifying any trends relating to capacity, availability, incident repetition, and incident volumes to try and identify where changes could be made to the client IT infrastructure, or the way in which we support to increase the performance, availability, or end user satisfaction of the services used.
2) Continual Service Improvement: Each of our Service Managers maintains a Continual Service Improvement Plan, that relates to the customer’s specific support requirements. At the lowest level, this acts as a way of prioritising and tracking simple improvement initiatives such as tweaking process to better suit the customer’s needs, but is equally used to drive technology enhancements and innovations to align to the customers ever evolving business requirements.
3) Internal Review Meetings: To underpin and progress improvement initiatives identified as part of the Continuous Service Improvement process, the SaintGroup Service Delivery Manager holds frequent internal review meetings to ensure that Continual Service Improvements are being progressed
4) Customer Satisfaction: For those customers who elect to opt-in, SaintGroup provide an end user satisfaction service where a user is surveyed upon their call being completed, to gauge their satisfaction with the service received. Our service management teams report on the overall satisfaction levels within the user base, and in conjunction with our customers will use this information to identify areas where we can further improve our service.
5) Change Management: Our service Managers are ITIL qualified, and operate within the type of ITIL based service operation that is commonly adopted throughout the IT support industry. Good Change Management is vital in ensuring the systems availability is kept to a maximum. SaintGroup Service Delivery managers represent their customers in the Change Advisory Board, to ensure that any changes to the customer estate are required, beneficial, and that every eventuality has been considered to minimise service degradation whilst the change takes place.
6) Problem Management: While it is always nice to have incidents resolved quickly, it is far better to prevent them altogether. SaintGroup achieves this through Problem Management. Using call trend analysis we proactively identify repeat issues, and review how to prevent these from re-occurring. Representing the customer in a similar way to the Change Advisory Board, the Service Delivery Manager will attend these meetings and work with the operations teams and the customer, to identify solutions to eliminate the root cause of repeat incidents.
7) Relationship Management: SaintGroup positions our service delivery managers to be the primary conduit between the customer and the Managed Service provided. Therefore if there is a need to escalate an issue, seek clarity, advice, requests a change or amendment to the service, or for any other general query or requirement, then our Service Delivery Managers would act as the primary port of call.
Hopefully this article goes some way to clarifying the value that Service Delivery Management brings to the customer experience, and explains why for SaintGroup, the appointment of an SDM to all of of our Managed Service contracts is essential in providing the level of service that our customers deserve.
- Tags: Customers, Deployment, Opinion Piece, Services
