In this episode, Nicole and Ben discuss the importance of IT Service Management and how any business can take advantage of the benefits through FITSM, Federate Information Technology Service Management.
Head to the FITSM website to gain access to the framework, the self-paced training, and self-assessments at https://www.fitsm.eu/
Transcript of Mayhem and MISfits
Episode 9 – IT gets FIT-SM
Nicole Grimm
Hello, my name is Nicole Grimm.
Ben Rockey
And I'm Ben Rockey.
Nicole Grimm
And this is mayhem and misfits where we take a. Fun look at business gone. Awry, and the systems that save them. Today we're going to talk about. IT service management.
Ben Rockey
Or what I like to call the old say what you're going to do and then do what you say, plan.
Nicole Grimm
Wow, that's a lot of words. We could boil that down into a title of some sort. But before we get into that title of the service management, we're actually going to talk about we should talk about IT. Service management as it relates to service. Management as a whole. In plain terms, service management is the process and practice of organizing flows and work to fulfill the needs of customers.
Ben Rockey
That's good, yeah.
Nicole Grimm
Yeah, every business or organization practices service management in one way or another, even if they don't slap that label on it or call it that, or waive some service management flag.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, I think I think. I really look at it is. Let's say for example you sell strawberry plants and the process of planning your yields to have enough plants to sell and the sales process to your customer and the delivery of the plants and the customer service to handle issues of plant quality and delivery and billing. All that together is a service management process. Relative to the size of your team and customer base. The simple, the service management plan could be really simple, or it could be really complicated. If you have a team of 10, they're not going to do the same amount of work that a team of 100 is going to do. A business can only set. Tasks and goals. That they're able to sustain.
Nicole Grimm
Right, it's all relative to scale. As an example, right in the IT world or information technology world and industry, it's common for an IT team to think of themselves as a business serving the business or business within the business. At least to some maturity standard, and this would be when you have an IT team per say, so you may not quite. See this work. So in one off situations, if you have like an individual person supporting an organization.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, one one person or somebody whose job is doing something and then in addition to the thing they do, they're also in charge of making sure the computers work.
Nicole Grimm
Right? Right, we've seen that many times where they don't have an IT department and internal resource, but they can, you know, make it work on their in their spare time if you. Will so in an IT framework or department or some mature organization of some sort, they're going to see themselves reflected as this servicing. Engine to serve the business need. They are responding to their business needs so their customer base is the user community, their business partners, what have you. They have their own little bubble to service them as a whole. Most of the time in that department. Internal department structure. They wouldn't necessarily be. Supporting external
Ben Rockey
Yeah, they're they're a business inside the business.
Nicole Grimm
Right for the. Most part now you would maybe have the areas where those businesses that it's kind of confusing to figure out if they are a technology company or a widget company and those spaces you might see a blurred line between servicing external customers and the internal business.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, if your if your business is highly technical, it's not uncommon to see everybody on the same team, but for most businesses the IT team, the IS team is work. In support of the business, not as a component of the business.
Nicole Grimm
In an internal support organization, so in that case. And I might even throw in an idea here that if you are in a space where it is confusing to figure out if. You're a technology or a customer centered or a widget centered business. You may find the need for actually labeling this a service organization and putting solid frameworks around it even more. Important because if you are actually facing external customer and delivering to them technical. Items or Technical Support or technical infrastructure. Anything like that as part of the product offering, then having a service management is even more crucial. A lot of times people might say well internally if we have problems or we haven't really. Matured, our process to become. Better with servicing the internal business. What we can kind of get away with a little bit more because it's just inside baseball issues, right? Right, so this should benefit this topic. Should benefit both situations. The more common situation of being internal by developing more business value right away and seeing that return on investment. And if you are in a space where your IT department does externally. Face then this should be even more important of a topic to follow. So given that caveat and that framework to operate from. We'll jump into what is it that we are actually talking about in this specific case? What's the label? The title and the dive in that we're going to go into? In this case, we're actually talking about a particular subset called fitsum.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, so well maybe we should start with why we even care about this so. Fitsum, which we'll discuss in a moment, is a kind of IT service management ITSM, and what ITSM represents is what we've been talking about. A way to manage and control and run the IT needs of your company. Whether you have an IT department. Or you have MSP and and certain people in charge of managing them having a process. Makes it way more effective to know that you can trust in those systems. A good example of why it matters is something that brought about why it fits and was created. In the first place. So the origin of that goes back to 2000 and in the European Union the European Union had come to the conclusion that they were kind of lagging behind Japan and the US with technology advancements and one of the things they identify. It was, you know, in Japan and in the US. They've done a really good job of bringing all of their universities and institutes and laboratories into these cohesive working groups where they could work on scientific problems together. So we should do the same thing across countries and across universities. And so they established something called the European Research Area and the the goal was let's all work together to take full advantage of all the resources we have. Well, as you'd expect something that's scientific and very technical. There's normally a lot of integration of systems that's required, so there's a lot of different computer and IT systems and database systems and. Different type of technical software that's being used in all these different environments, but now they have to be used across all these different environments, so each bit each laboratory or university. Is now being called upon to share information with others, and most of that's going through the IT teams or IT people who are responsible in some very small organizations up through very large university level IT departments and what was happening was a lot of struggle in communication not just with you know, languages from say. Spain to to France. But actually talking about hey, I need you to think about how you guys are handling your it in this way. Or hey, there's a problem, but I don't know how to explain it to you or we're not using the same kind of vocabulary to explain these problems, and we're things getting lost in translation, literally. So A-Team was put together, who said? Team here's your job. You're kind of the heads of all these major major major universities. You need to come up with a way that all the IT teams can work together and we can keep a handle on these requests that are coming through for work to get done. And these problems we're having with making sure things are available and need to be available. We need like standards and just a way to talk to each other and so the group got together and they said. Well, we could try to come up with something new, but really there's already a standard out there called ISM that we can follow IT service manager. It's it's based upon some processes and it's some workflows need to follow to run your IT team and it incorporates something called idle which is a library of rules and conditions that and very bulky way of managing and rules to follow on bureaucracy. You can follow inside your department. For large organizations it makes a lot of sense because it it gives everyone the same playbook. To play from. But what this group understood was that there was also some very small organizations that were. Going to have to. Be asked to follow those rules and it. Was just. It wasn't something they can. You to ask a team of two or three IT people to take on the adopting the full suite of ISM rules and other rules. And do their job at the same time. So the group said OK, let's take a step back. What are the critical things we need to do? To make sure we're solving this problem of communicating with each other and making sure that when we request something it doesn't get lost, and when I talk about certain terms, there's just terms that always matter, regardless of who we're talking to in the IT. The world. What can we do there? And so they? Sat down and stripped back ISM to the most pragmatic form it could be. So they could start talking to each other and working each other and a set of rules that was equitable for everyone to participate in.
Nicole Grimm
Right from the smallest team upwards. So this is essentially the starting point. For anyone who is foreign to this subject, this is where we would advise organizations to start. If you've never done it before.
Ben Rockey
And you may see yourself in it if you have an organization where you don't have an IT team or the IT team team you have today is small. What you might see if you look inside your organization, you may not be working with hundreds of other organizations. You're just working with yourself and your own departments, your own teams, but you may see yourself in this mayhem if the way that you handle work is every time I have a. Problem I e-mail Tommy and Tommy, or Betty or whoever your player to be named is. Takes it, they're the one with the most experience. Or maybe they're the IT person and they'll do what they can to fix the problem and they're managing their entire work through e-mail and. Sometimes it gets done on time. They have to make their own judgments about what's important and what's not important, and they don't necessarily have any place to take that information once they've done something with it. You're probably not having regular meetings about. How we can improve the? Environment we have. Betty may not know to you how what even to bring. Up to whom? As far as. Hey, I think I have an idea about how we can make things better. And more importantly than anything else you may not be identifying. Problems, issues are becoming problems that you see them so, so repetitively. There's a lot of. Of just noise and anxiety of really only thing our IT department does is I give a problem to somebody and it eventually gets fixed and that is the extent. Of our management of the problem.
Nicole Grimm
Right, a space where I would see that there is lack of service management understanding. Buy in trust of the entire process would be a typical example. We would have from leadership. Level participants who ask us to engage their company would be yeah, we have IT people. These people that go around and fix stuff I don't really know what they. Do they're gone a lot? Shoot, maybe they're not even here. I don't know. They sometimes I can find them and we fix stuff. And oh gosh, a lot of times I have to explain to them over and over again the same thing or this one programmer person that we have as a vendor on the back end constantly sends us complaints that he's telling. These people again how to fix this thing and why aren't they recording it and right they. Should know I. Told them once. I sent them an e-mail customer or a person may send them an e-mail and it goes into this black box and things happen. I guess I don't know my computer has come from various resources that maybe eBay maybe any sources? They are not consistent. Everyone has different computers. I have a sales guy that I hired. And they gave them a desktop. Why would they do? That that's stupid. They're traveling all the time and I need my salespeople out there doing this thing so very confusing, inconsistent, not meeting a expected standard that.
Ben Rockey
Very person driven.
Nicole Grimm
Right and mood and I didn't know I didn't have the information. Oh, I forgot that sticky note and that told me how to fix that one problem that they told me about 3. Months ago I. Forgot these kinds of things are all symptoms of the underlying problem. Which is how are you going to manage this into a process for which you can build from and one point we'll touch on later. Continuously improve from.
Ben Rockey
Right?
Nicole Grimm
So how can you build that foundation? So First things first, what is fitsum?
Ben Rockey
So what what the? UA Camp came up with was this lightweight version called fits them now what fits them stands for is. Federated IT service management. We're not going to get too down the rabbit hole, but the reason they call it Federated was just the makeup of how they were set up. They were a federation of different organizations, so that's where the. Name came from.
Nicole Grimm
They don't have ownership. It isn't an internal control. Their partners are different vendors. Different areas of the university, different vendors, all different walks of life, right? Different sizes. Small, medium, large. All these different factors that come.
Ben Rockey
Into it, the goal was, hey, all of all of you that make up this federation. Here's a here's a lightweight tool set that if we all follow, we'll make it easier for us to. All work with each other.
Nicole Grimm
Right, and for the bigger organizations, they may laugh at it. Quote UN quote to some degree, like, oh, you only mean 1/4 of the entire process. Subrate sure and then the little guys that are coming in just learning. Maybe they're like, oh this is so awesome I can totally follow this so you have this blending and agreeance of this is a good place to start.
Ben Rockey
Right?
Nicole Grimm
Everything else from there is just cherries and sprinkles on top, but at least we have a good Sunday to dig into.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, I mean fits in. I mean the point being fits some offers of version of service management that's just more access. And it it's set up in a way that for your business where maybe it's you have a person internally that does things and maybe you have a development team that does work for your primary system that you put tickets in for and you have to track. And maybe you. Have a server or a cloud? Device that you have to maintain and you may have an MSP that's handling your. And service man service management which good chance both that development team and that MSP are probably following some form of ISM. If, if you internalize fits them, it gives you a platform to work with them more more coherently as well, and most experiences you'll you'll find that their response is. Oh, this is great. If you guys are going to follow this playbook, it makes it easier for us. To support you.
Nicole Grimm
Right, we've all agreed.
Ben Rockey
And by the way. We have tool sets that if you're going to follow. This process you. Can use what we use for yourself so it doesn't take even a lot of times and take any more investment on your part because the part you're working with May already have the tools set that aligns to these ideas about how. To do work.
Nicole Grimm
That's true, some organizations that's turned on this. If it's some methodology internalized, would have the opportunity to use their managed service providers ticketing system and they. Say oh we'll always. To do is give you access and you're going to know exactly how. To manage content that we already manage, we're speaking the same language. Sure, you can jump. And I would asterisk that that is sometimes offered. We might have licensing concerns or things like that, that he might bring up, but at least the opportunity of oh, that you're going to speak the same language. We already have a world. Please come in the door if you will, of how we kind of operate. And then you can give clarity to that black box, if you will.
Ben Rockey
Right?
Nicole Grimm
Like where does work go and how do I see it? Report it and understand it?
Ben Rockey
To do that, you have to adopt the ISM, and in our case the fits and mindset and So what is fits and fits them is a set of. A set of requirements and a set of objectives that you will anoint someone to understand for your organization. It is not big, it should take maybe a day to soak it all in. It'll take longer to perfect it, but it'll take about a day to. Soak it all in. Once they've soaked it in, there are templates and there's guides that they can use to implement the best practices set up in. Some as well as an assessment tool to help gauge where you're at today. Help you gauge yourself year after year so you can see areas of the process that you can improve upon.
Nicole Grimm
Right, that would be perfect space actually too. It wouldn't be nice to get like a graded report to say that you have nothing, and now you have something and you can measure something against that.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, and it's a self-assessment it. It's something you're using it, it's it's. It's you taking your own weight. If you will, you're doing it for you so you know you're at and you know what you can work on. To get healthier if you will.
Nicole Grimm
Right exactly and then it takes these vocabularies requirements and objectives and kind of and this assessment is following along of. A framework.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, now one of the low hanging fruits and I think almost everyone has had some experience of this. At some point, put in a help desk ticket. Put help desk ticket in that. That's a pretty common phrase.
Nicole Grimm
It should be. Some places might just say, well, I just emailed somebody.
Ben Rockey
Right, that's the extent of putting a help desk ticket in. So if the next step of putting a help desk ticket in should be that e-mail or that phone call or. If, if you're lucky enough to have a system put in into, that is where you start to see where ITSM shows up.
Nicole Grimm
I would say that I've seen this in publications before. I cannot articulate where the content is from where this is. Not a literal.
Ben Rockey
Not not quoting exactly.
Nicole Grimm
Measurement, but not quoting specifically, but I have seen that of the IT service management frameworks 95 or 90% of organizations utilize the number one item they're utilizing from the framework. Is a ticketing system. Therefore, if you are using a ticketing system. Already on their path to service management.
Ben Rockey
Right, because you're tracking your.
Nicole Grimm
Right, if you don't have a ticketing system today that is an indicator of even following it, and that's kind of one piece that many people could relate to in terms of what is service management. What do I get out of it?
Ben Rockey
Right?
Nicole Grimm
The very first most common thing would be a ticketing system.
Ben Rockey
Right?
Nicole Grimm
Easy to translate if you have never seen one before I'm sure. Others around who have this is not going to be a large thing to. Large hurdle to jump to get across the goal line. If you want to get started.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, it's a it. It is a. It is an important first step. It is. It is a. It is a centerpiece or cornerstone. However you want. To begin your measurement, starting with actually just tracking the work. And that's for a lot of simple reasons. You want to make sure that the the people or the the person who's accountable for making sure that work work gets done. Has a place to go to see what has to get done and the people who are responsible for doing it have a place to work from and that's just the first step. The second step, that that system gives you is if you're tracking it and you're keeping those task items in one place, and you learn how to categorize them. You can start to run reports against that data, and one of the terms you will learn is issue versus problem. So an issue is is the help desk ticket. I have an issue and I put a ticket in. And that some of the vocabulary you're going to learn from the FITSUM framework. This becomes so when you say issue people who know the FITSUM framework will go. Oh, I know, an issue is basically like a helpdesk ticket.
Nicole Grimm
Or what the definition of an issue is? What the underlying idea of an issue is?
Ben Rockey
And then you'll learn a term problem, well issue and problem in that vocabulary are different. An issue is an issue is the ticket. It's the this this some exception or some need occurred and I put in a ticket and that's that's the issue I have. A problem is when that issue reoccurs. So for example. There was a customer who about every two weeks their office area where their core switch was at and where their Internet comes into and their servers at the power would would just go out and have a breaker trip. And it was repetitive almost every two weeks, almost at 10. 30 on Monday.
Nicole Grimm
Right, so the idea is. Somebody's noticing this pattern, right?
Ben Rockey
So you can run report against it, right? So after the fifth time of OK, whatever is causing the breaker to trip, it's always occurring about this time. Every two weeks, so what's what's happening that's causing this to trip? We should go identify that's what stops happening.
Nicole Grimm
Oh oh, we should build some AI model that can watch this and tell you oh or no, we could just start by recording it.
Ben Rockey
Just just record it and then you know, run a simple. Filter on whatever you're using to go. Oh, this this one this has occurred 6 times.
Nicole Grimm
Weird that we heard of before.
Ben Rockey
Well, now you have a problem you. Can go solve? And in this case they found out someone was doing some pressure washing. They were plugging into the same circuit every time and it was causing.
Nicole Grimm
And overload and taking down the entire company.
Ben Rockey
An overload on that they were. They had a bad ground. And then they. All that pressure washer person was doing. Was just moved to another outlet. And and you know they would move out their day and it just so happened that one outlet was connected to the. Same circuit as. As the server equipment.
Nicole Grimm
Yeah, that's a fun one.
Ben Rockey
But when you track these things and someone's paying attention to what's going on, and you can say oh, this is happening routinely under these conditions. Now you can take this recurring issue. That's become a problem, solve the problem and you remove issues.
Nicole Grimm
Correct, so I think he. Obvious highlight to this whole thing is. This is called. IT service management so only having a ticketing system for which no one is watching and no one is managing you still will have this loop that is not closed. In this case you needed someone to watch for this pattern. This reoccurring pattern over time. Just capturing the ticket and not putting into this management framework. Watching the overall shift of things and what's going on in patterns and all this kind of. You're kind of missing a bit of the point, but if you do have this piece in there, someone assigned to it, what have you? You can close. These loops and stop the silliness from happening. I think everybody could relate to stories like this in their area.
Ben Rockey
So with that explaining what fits them. Why fits them over any other process? Well, there's lots of reasons. The biggest one is there's no barrier to entry. It is open source. The cost to your team is your team's time to follow it.
Nicole Grimm
Exactly, that's one of the best parts. This is freely available available content out there.
Ben Rockey
And we'll we'll have links in the in the show notes that you can go to some of these resources. But the the point is. If you want to. Do it. The only thing holding you back is doing it.
Nicole Grimm
Right, it's all based off of a common creative license, right? That people can download and get started and follow the assessments and work on the templates and and then there's also resources out there. Trained individuals like ourselves or other organizations that they can go the extra mile and make sure that their team is. Actually, educated, trained, tested and validated against these measures as well so you can go from. Just do it in your DIY if you will all the way up to making sure your organization is actually committed to and tested against these standards.
Ben Rockey
Right now to that point, when you are testing against these standards, there's other other organizations that care about it that you work with. If you work with customers or distributors that have ISO regulate regulations, they like to follow, which means they also have to hold other members of their supply chain. To certain standards or and almost every business I I've worked with you've worked with we've. With has reflected this insurance agencies who insure your business. There are standards you need to meet for insurance and your your insurance rates are directly rated against aspects of your IS departments. Support of your business if you are. Indoctrinating ITSM and you follow fitsum. You're going to meet most requirements, if not all that the insurance agency is requesting, or these vendors are request. And be aligned ahead of them saying so. How do you guys back up your servers? Do you have any kind of security? If you're following fit some you have answered some of these questions early and good chance you've already resolved them before you're having these conversations.
Nicole Grimm
Right exactly yeah, it ensures that you're speaking the same language and operating in standards business practices in this space. If you have any technology that you're using. This is an ideal place to start to answer to any of those needs. If you are distributing food products and that kind of, you're going to have a food safety officer. You should always have a framework too on distributing, sharing or containing any kind of technical data. You may have those same obligations, different standards that you'd have. You're selling things and containing personal information, payment information, credit card information, all these things you operate any of these kinds of activity. Reason you should have some concerns around this.
Ben Rockey
The extension of this is as an organization. If you have started to make the decision that you want to have your business adhere to some standards, the ISO standard is very common. Fitsum is compatible with ISO EC 20,000 dash one, so that's a component of several of the ISO standards that your company can. Integrate as a, you know meet that requirement. With Fitsum, the IS if you will components of your ISO requirements will be adhered to. If you've adopted fits because fits and written in a way. To to be compliant with ISO.
Nicole Grimm
Right, they've essentially taken all the same frameworks and just said. What is the most critical to? Get started, let's just go there. And then from there you just keep upgrading and upgrading and upgrading into these higher level service management. Methodologies and frameworks.
Ben Rockey
More of the. Tangible to your business. Reasons for doing it is if you're following all of the fits and guidelines and you're doing your assessments and you're ensuring that you've written out what your sustainability needs are, which you how you would recover from a disaster, how much capacity need to have? What the expectations are for system availability. A budget who's accountable. Having all these things? Give you the ability to have a more stable environment because you're actually building against a plan as opposed to building against a feeling.
Nicole Grimm
So you know this black box of work that goes to technical parties is has more light shed on it. You're able to watch what their management structure is, you understand because there's a common language and a framework you've agreed to. How you can measure that and that power washer. Incidents in your example. Should just be solved as part of their normal cadence of work. In this case it won't necessarily be a screaming situation or a firefighting situation at that point where it's the 10th time, it's happened and you have lost equivalent of $1,000,000. Now where if they would have solved it the first three rounds you'd only be 300. That was a loss in.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, whatever the number is.
Nicole Grimm
Productivity or what have you right? So it should have a return on investment in just that, knowing that this system has some management around it and those problems, incidences, issues things like that that develop into larger scale problems. Have a place. For monitoring and correction and continuously improving so that those noises don't even make it to a higher level desk or make it to a. Higher level issue.
Ben Rockey
Right and and to that it also gives those who are involved, whether it's your, MSP or whoever your help desk or IT or IS or programmer person is. The house, a process they can follow so they're going to work more efficiently because they're not making. It up every time. Instead of, how should I handle this every time they get a request? It's this is how we handle this and everyone knows that process and there's a. There's a very clear path to follow every time and everyone knows it.
Nicole Grimm
Right or, or better yet they know it the most and your user community just needs to and easily could trust them.
Ben Rockey
And that's the key thing. That's what happens next is it builds trust in the IT team and it builds trust in the systems. And that's really the biggest payout. If you adopt fits them and you follow it and you adhere to its guidelines and its suggestions and its practices. It doesn't just build a better air quotes IT team it it builds a better IT system because everyone will know how it's maintained and if they are the key people who know need to know how it maintained will know how, which means the system will be more available, which means fewer issues and. Fewer problems for everyone and a higher degree of trust in the. The type of applications and systems you have that everyone needs to realign to do their job of your business.
Nicole Grimm
And ideally your IT team will be a bunch of heroes running around and everyone's breathing well and calmly because they're just getting their work done. And best case scenario, it runs like such a smooth operating machine. That you almost never hear a complaint and your IT team is so bored. Because they have no outstanding huge issues to chase that. All they can do now is deliver straight value to the business. Continuously improve and start churning a whole nother ball game of conversation into this, which is now what? What can we do to actually challenge the business to get better? And go from there using the same methodology and same framework too. Not crawl, but run.
Ben Rockey
And that's something we can actually show an example of. So there was an organization that we work with in logistics. They were going through a big change. They had an upgrade that was underway. They had a person who had handled all their IT stuff for forever. Who was getting ready to retire and they had never really a staff even though their business highly relied on their core system running to do their job. They had never established. A very strong. Long IT plan they had they had an MSP that would take care of their technology who come in to fix computers and make sure the servers are working and they had somebody internally who understood the application. But none of that was. Working in in conjunction with each. Other there were no standards set, it was simply. There's somebody in charge of it so. Don't worry about it.
Nicole Grimm
Or we turned it on and it worked today. Why wouldn't it work tomorrow?
Ben Rockey
Right?
Nicole Grimm
So how do I fix?
Ben Rockey
Well, I think the. The best way to tell that is to tell. That as a. Story and the process. One of our clients went through.
Nicole Grimm
Oh, stories are always fun.
Ben Rockey
I hope so. I like the ending though, so that that's a good part.
Nicole Grimm
Oh, of course, it's just the misfit.
Ben Rockey
The story, but I know. How I know how the story ends so? That's that's a good thing.
Nicole Grimm
And it's not ending ban. It's continuously improving.
Ben Rockey
That's continuous, I you know what you're right. This is a point in time story.
Nicole Grimm
And it is still going, and that's what we're so proud of for. This customer, yeah.
Ben Rockey
So we have a logistics company that we work with and moons ago they were coming to a moment in time where the person that had been there for a long time was getting ready to to retire and that person was had been there since kind of the beginning of the company and really knew their processes and was the person who brought in. The system they used to to run their company. They were very adept, but it was just a person. It was never a formalized IT position because that person also had a lot of other responsibilities on top of their day job of being. You know if you will assist them, administrator and developer inside the application. The company had an MSP that they were working with who was handling their phone lines. And their servers and the desktops and and taking care of the business. The the MSP was kind of. Kind of following their own program wasn't asking a lot of the of this company of a process to follow and there was always kind of a challenge with what we take care of what what you take care of what, who should we call, how we should call? So just to kind of a lot. Of noise going on and. When this moment came up where the company saw this OK, we have this opportunity to change. They said well, if we. Have this opportunity to change. What do we need to do to make things? And what we brought to them was, well, you should follow, fits them. Let's let's take fits them as our model for how the business should be set up. And go forward. So the first thing we need to do is someone in the business needs to say this is what we're. Going to do. And and that person needs to be the owner so the owner rose their hand and said yes, I want to follow a program and we're going to hire somebody and that person who's replacing the person who's leaving. They're going to move forward. Is with fits them as their model to follow for our business so that we can meet all these. Objectives and requirements and know that we're actually handling RT IT department like we want to, even if it's just 90 department of 1 and these partners. We work with.
Nicole Grimm
Right and the company has grown extensively from the initial person who is now retiring over that course of time.
Ben Rockey
Oh yeah.
Nicole Grimm
So how can we handle the next generation the next?
Ben Rockey
And and whatever changes we want to make to our business, right? So in addition to this change with the, with the person retiring was also the business. Was trying to find. Other things they could do within their inside their business to. Attract new customers, grow their customer base. They are going to make changes internally to their own business, let alone to their IT.
Nicole Grimm
Team so they already kind of knew that they wanted to have a a baseline of a working system for which that IT role was so bored that they were going to take on all these other things that. We already put on their plate. Of advancements and future forward thinking ideas.
Ben Rockey
So the person that the company hired wasn't a traditional IT person. They were a person who really understood the logistics and business processes of a logistics. Company who was willing to take on the responsibilities, which was kind of a great fit because it was somebody who really understood the business and then also knew who to work, how to work with the vendors they they had to meet, the needs of the business it was. It was a great. Great marriage.
Nicole Grimm
I think that is a perfect point for our listening audience, and most of the time in our customer base that they don't really see this huge demand for a lot of consumptive IT topics. So if they can get a Jack of all trades if they can squeeze one out of a resource and really stretch the. Budget, that's what they usually want to start. With really honing in on. Getting a bunch of IT. People to run around everywhere. It's not their sweet spot to start from, so if we can build this in, that is a perfect framework.
Ben Rockey
Right?
Nicole Grimm
And in this case worked perfectly because you just have somebody who has a systems mindset, but. Is more business inclined. This kind of framework is so easy to follow and adopt that you don't have to have an extensive IT degree to even start to think about this. It's common speak.
Ben Rockey
And so when that person came on, and as the other person was transitioning out, we started a process of collecting information, talking about what the business needed to worry about, the person that was was getting ready to retire was was absolutely included in hey, what are the things that we have to worry about every year? Who handles this? Who handles that? Should we be getting somebody in charge of our printers because the printers? Seem like a big A. Big deal here. We should probably maybe find a way to make the printers more easy to handle and and so decision was made. You know we're going to get a a printer provider who will come in and take care of the printers for us, and you know our our MSP is doing a really great job with the phones, but. We just need more support. Maybe we should. We should look around and see. Because now that we've started to just evaluate where we're at by going through this evaluation process, there seems to be a real gap in the support we're getting on certain sides and and so. OK, we're going to. Do a little bit of research and see who. Else we could bring in. So the first provider stayed on for one, could go on the business, but then another provider was brought in for another component. Of the support business.
Nicole Grimm
And that's an important point to mention. Just because they had checked a box of what we have an MSP. We had found that the standard of care, if you will from the MSP was below what we would expect, and in an assessment it would give you those indications that there is a higher level of standard you should be expecting from these partners. Here's the level so you can measure that against their.
Speaker
You know?
Nicole Grimm
Delivered results
Ben Rockey
One of the things that you'll you'll find it at MSP's are really responsive. If you've taken a chance to assess yourself and say. OK, we're really clear on what we have here and we have a real clarity of what we need from you. And so here's what we have, and here's what we expect and. You'll find to have. A really easy time talking to IT. Service providers outside your company. If you come with an explanation of we've already taken the time to kind of assess what we need. As opposed to so you guys take care of it so you can figure out what we need and they'll tell you yes, because they want to make a sale, and because in general they'll they'll eventually get there because we're going to go through their own process of IT SM to meet your needs. But if you come in it early with a clear picture of we've taken the time to figure out how long we can be down, what we expect of our systems labeled all the systems we have have a list of all the support numbers you have to call on our contracts, and we know we're. Up to date on all of our support contracts. That makes the Ms. Job MSP's job so much easier, and being able to answer to. What they'll need to help you and what it will cost to help you as opposed to.
Nicole Grimm
And they know you're going to speak their language. You understand how this works. It's not starting from square one, right? We all have this agreed upon standard, and there's doesn't have to be as many surprises.
Ben Rockey
It also sets up those providers to know.
Nicole Grimm
That you're.
Ben Rockey
Watching that you're watching.
Nicole Grimm
And you know what? The standards should be.
Ben Rockey
And so that's a part of the of the. You know. How do I fit some is step one is the business says we're going to do this, and so the owner says, yeah, we're going to follow a program and this is the person who's going to be accountable for it to making sure we're following the process. And so then that person takes the time to go through the fits and requirements. Get an understanding of how the fits and process. Works and then goes about starting to actually implement the guides. Put a tracking system in place for issues. Make sure we're actually writing down whatever recovery plan needs to be start to understand how much capacity we need for Gee. How many documents are we saving every year? We might run out of hard drive space. Or are we paying for enough cloud storage? Or has anybody taken the time to make sure we're up to date on how many users we have coming and going? Maybe we're overpaying. Maybe we're underpaying for what we use with this CRM tool or tracking tool or logistics tool. A lot of questions get answered that when you take the time to do the assessment. You can start making judgments against. Once those things are all in place, now that person who's accountable for actually the fall following the program can start to make educated assessments of what you need to do next or for the next year. Because all of those things are being tracked.
Nicole Grimm
And this is what the customer actually did.
Ben Rockey
This is what the customer actually did. Additionally, one of the the guidelines of ITSM, it says, and you're going to report on this back to the business and the business is going to give you information so you know what to do and so the business started holding monthly steering meetings where the heads of the department, the CFO, the President. The the Chief Operating officer and this this person who took over the IT role. Would get together every month. Talk about what's coming. Talk about some of the business changes that might be coming, and some software they need to look at to to to make that achievable this. IT person was able to say hey we have an update coming up. We're going to have to like plan some downtime. I'm going to need some people involved. To actually test. This new update before we go live with it. We have these. Charges that are gonna come with it. We need to all put these on a plan and have an assessment and understand that I know there's a lot we want to do, but all these requests stack up. There's just me and our outside resources. Yeah, how do what gets put first? Because you take it part of this fits and process is also taking all of this back to the business and saying back to leadership and saying. This is what we're doing. What should we be doing? What else do we? Need to be doing.
Nicole Grimm
Right exactly everyone can follow along. This is not uncommon for any other space like we started with.
Ben Rockey
Right? So I think that just brings us to. Well, what do I do? How do I get started?
Nicole Grimm
Yeah, where do I get started? So we'll start off with three basic steps to even. Kick this off first and foremost, as you mentioned for that poster child. Perfect client is assigned someone. Someone has to be responsible for even spelling fits them. As I would. Say right, so can you spell fits them? Do you crack open the material? Have you gone to the. Site have you started to even get started?
Ben Rockey
Right?
Nicole Grimm
And then are you? Going to carry the proverbial torch. Next from there. And with that assignment you have buy in from the business all this kind of underlining assumptions are clarified and not assumed anymore, right? Business knows that you're going. To do it, we've all kind of agreed across the board if you will. That this is something we're going to take on. Since you do have to have that full closed loop between the. Business and IT. Doing an assessment and grading each other and what have you of. How it's going? Then Step 2 would be take that assessment. I'd say that would be your perfect point to start at. Once you have that, buy in. See where we're at.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, there's a lot of assumptions in this, right? So if you're going to the step one kind of knocks off a lot of a lot of boxes of if you've assigned somebody to take on the fits and role, then you've already decided as a business you're going to follow with fits some kind of checks more than one box.
Nicole Grimm
It should.
Ben Rockey
And once you have that role assigned. You gotta start from somewhere in the first. One is, let's just see if we can answer these assessment questions. Maybe we maybe we're zeros across the board.
Nicole Grimm
Could be then you have. A0 can only go up from there.
Ben Rockey
But right all the all, that is, is all all that assess that assessment doesn't. Mean anything other than you've measured yourself.
Speaker
Right?
Ben Rockey
And that's already the first great step.
Nicole Grimm
Yeah, don't let it put you down.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, the the grade, the. Grade doesn't matter, the action is.
Nicole Grimm
What matters improving from that grade is what matters. Yeah, whatever it actually is, just capture a state, the current state. 8 And your future state, and then measure against it right, and measure against attaining it hopefully, and you may have bumps and bruises along the way, but at least you can articulate them, see them, and then improve from them. And and from that I mean, I've kind of already mentioned it, but start tracking your issues. Like we mentioned before, the number one thing out of a service management framework that places you is even if they don't know they're doing it as a. Ticketing system. Start tracking. Get to getting going and that in and of itself is its own like beast. To really get the ball rolling. But once that gets started the rest just kind of are much easier to attain.
Ben Rockey
The fits and program is going to show you how to like hear the things you need to worry about when you're asking how to make a ticket so it is going to give you the the data you're going to track.
Nicole Grimm
Right what? Field, you need a who and a assigned to and a status.
Ben Rockey
And it it can be as as low low tech as you know somebody filling out a paper preferably.
Nicole Grimm
These kinds of things right?
Ben Rockey
You're doing this. In a system of some kind, you already have. Whether it's a Google sheet, I will tell you I'm going to make Nicole's eyes roll here, but if it's even in Excel, some.
Nicole Grimm
The sheet and excel are all the same.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, it's, but if you could get.
Nicole Grimm
As long as it's temporary home.
Ben Rockey
To taking advantage of something like SharePoint that can track tasks or Microsoft tasks, there's there's several different platforms that you probably already have access to.
Nicole Grimm
Basically, create a bucket to capture. It all and track it, yeah? But whatever that means.
Ben Rockey
And if you already have. Maybe maybe talk to them if they already have an issue tracking system that you can have advantage. Of they might just extend what what they have to you so you can get started. There's, but the point is, whichever path you follow. Start tracking.
Nicole Grimm
Exactly, so those would be the three steps to even get started and then from there it's more crawling than it is scooting. Along if you will.
Ben Rockey
But every incremental change is a positive change.
Nicole Grimm
For sure, and since this framework gives you a path to continuously improve if you start with these three things, there's only up from there. So I think that's the perfect place to get it started, since everyone is actively logging in right now. And getting started today making phone calls. So we should wrap this up so they can start making those phone calls now. So alright everyone. Thanks for listening. We hope you found. Some value in this conversation. Please join us again next time for more mayhem and Misfits.