Introduction
Many service contracts last for a number of years – and for reasons such as the inconvenience of changing suppliers or contractual restrictions – it is advantageous for both the client and supplier to make a relationship work. Glenholme Consulting has developed our Service Delivery Optimisation (SDO) methodology to ensure this happens.
Whilst designed for defining “good versus bad” in terms of service delivery from an external partner, SDO can equally be applied to an internal service provider such as IT Operations.
Approach
The methodology is scenario based. SDO creates multiple service performance scenarios ranging from excellent to poor to disastrous, and describes the operational, commercial and contractual consequences for each scenario.
The scenario parameters are:
- Time – What is appropriately measured every year, month, day, hour ?
- Quality – What are the measures of quality, accuracy, timeliness, etc ?
- Remedies – Are the consequences of failure to deliver appropriate to the service delivery commitment. Do they deter failures from happening again ?
- Shared Benefits – Is the service delivery model consistent with a shared benefits model ?
- Measures – Does the way metrics are recorded accurately reflect the measure they are supposed to be reporting ?
- Reporting – Does the reporting accurately reflect the performance delivered ?
- Linkages to Contractual Terms – Are the consequences of poor performance aligned to the contractual warranties ?
The Benefits of Implementing Service Delivery Optimisation
During Vendor Selection, SDO can be used to compare service quality of the different responses to a tender.
During Contract Negotiation, SDO will enable the best possible service commitment to be agreed by anticipating the full range of service performance levels.
During Implementation, SDO should be a key acceptance criterion. Too often this is missed – acceptance testing is not just about checking that a solution works – it’s also about checking how well a solution works against specified criteria.
During Business As Usual, SDO can be used to benchmark the service quality.
For more information on the Service Delivery Optimisation methodology, please contact us on enquiries@glenholmeconsulting.com