What are the practical measures that need to be taken to establish belief in change and to manage it successfully? William Hooper reports from inside a service transformation. This article was originally published in Business Strategy Review Issue 4 2013 and is reproduced with permission. Inside Change_Business Strategy Review {Click on the link for free…
Many a governance body and service manager sees themselves as drowning in report data, but intelligence to inform decision-making and drive the business forward is elusive. How to get to brief, succinct relevance that informs and drives performance? Samuel Taylor Coleridge related his Rime of the Ancient Mariner in which the grey-beard loon narrates his…
Business users and IT (and other services) departments love to be rude about each other. Mutual incomprehension and worse frequently reign. What can be done to establish and maintain a healthy relationship and the high quality of service alignment? The gap between Business and IT has long been deep. IT people too often have little…
CEOs have long seen the potential for technical innovation to steal a march on their competition. Some like Google and Amazon have consummately reinvented their industries this way. Achieving the goal is however desperately difficult. What could you do to define the vision and deliver upon it? The Prize Strategists [Ref 1] have long spoken…
The reason for making any change is that there is an expectation that the new state will be sufficiently better than the current to justify the effort of undergoing the change. In business as usual, the customer needs to be sure that the service performs. Why do expected benefits so often not arise, and what…
There are few matters raising as much heat and as little light in service provision as innovation. Customers are often aggrieved that they do not get what they have paid for. Suppliers feel hard done-by that their contributions are not valued as they should. Why does this arise and what can we do about it?…
A major incident is the stuff of nightmares. Something has already gone colossally wrong, and there is so much potential to make it worse. Reputations and more are on the line and everyone is tense. What is it that differentiates those that handle this well from those that foul it up? Process is Not Enough…
The degree of change required to transform service provision from a prime model to one that engages multiple suppliers is significant. The many strands involved mean that it is not a simple issue that can be bought-in and forgotten. In this article, I concentrate on the job of implementation rather than sourcing and seek to point to some…
Projects have been running over-budget and late since the Pharaohs built their tombs. Since then, good practice has been published and qualifications have been established, so why do projects and programmes still go wrong? Whilst most projects slightly over-run, a significant minority goes catastrophically bad, even sinking their host companies. What can you do to…
There are many aspects of building a multi-supplier model that must be managed concurrently. This post focuses on the governance and operational conditions that must be established for successful Service Integration and Management (SIAM) and Systems Integration (SI). Not least of these is the skills and attitude needed within the retained governance. Transition No service…
