Chiltern PLC
Introducing ITIL Best Practice
Chiltern Plc is the UK's leading independent tax adviser. It offers a wide choice of tax related services - from tax consultancy and compliance to corporate governance and risk management.
In recent years the provision of IT Services within Chiltern has evolved significantly. When Plan-Net first became involved the IT Services were reactive and support processes were in an early stage of development. The brief given to Plan-Net by Rowland Sandys, Director of Infrastructure and Communication Services, centred on introducing ITIL Best Practice and improving customer service.
"We understood some of the benefits of adopting ITIL, but in terms of the specifics we were unclear as to what to tackle first" says Rowland Sandys. Heading up the project was Jon Efford, Principal Service Management Consultant at Plan-Net, who led a series of exploratory meetings with Sandys, together with other Chiltern personnel. These meetings led to an understanding of the key problem areas and a clearer definition of what needed to be done.
Service Desk and Incident Management became the priority areas. In addition, the need for ITIL awareness training for the support team members was also identified as being imperitive in order to gain the teams commitment and to develop their understanding of the ITIL framework.
Plan-Net proposed a flexible solution that rapidly delivered the majority of the ITIL benefits with minimum cost and resource investment. The solution focused on improving support processes for the key building block ITIL disciplines of Service Desk, Incident, Problem, Change and Service Level Management.
Jon explains "Plan-Net has developed this cost effective solution through identifying the 70-80 percent of requirements that all companies tend to have in common. We use these requirements as the foundation to start from. The remaining 20-30 percent of the solution is highly tailored and unique to the individual client organisation, thus providing the perfect fit in a significantly reduced timeframe."
From Rowland Sandy's perspective speed of implementation was a key success factor as he wanted to deliver noticeable results as quickly as possible. Given the challenging timescales, the project started with a number of high-level awareness sessions, aimed at educating key members of the team about the principles, concepts and benefi ts of the ITIL framework. This training was well received by the team and was particularly praised for highlighting the benefits of ITIL to them while being respectful of the existing culture. These sessions were repeated as the staff structure changed and new people joined the team.
The project was broken down into distinct and manageable phases. After improving the level of ITIL awareness within the core team, the next stage involved reworking the current process of managing calls. This focused on in-house support processes that weren't well defi ned and had become unsuitable and ineffi cient. Key issues included effective prioritisation, measuring and reporting as well as communications.
A number of initiatives to improve Service Desk effi ciency were put in place with the help of Plan-Net. As a result, all contact with the Service Desk is now recorded and all calls are captured and managed through a repeatable process.
The feedback at this point was very positive. "There was a marked improvement in service over the first six months of Plan-Net's engagement for our Customers", says Sandy. The split of enquiries via phone and email also altered following the phased introduction of Plan-Net's solutions. Previously, 60 percent of users accessed the help desk via the telephone, but with increased user confidence in a rapid response, the figures shifted towards email queries. This success was supported by ongoing reviews of the development and performance of the processes to ensure continued quality.
Another area where Chiltern benefited from Plan-Net's assistance was staffing. After initially recruiting a temporary full time service desk administrator, they decided to hire for a permanent position. Rowland explains, "Plan-Net helped us to define the role. If we had taken someone on before working with Plan-Net, we would have recruited a different person into a different role - to our disadvantage".
No service improvement takes place in a vacuum. An unexpected twist came shortly after Plan-Net had embarked on this project when internal restructuring led to a merged IT and Facilities Service Desk, forming a one-stop-shop for queries. This meant a shift in priorities which the Plan-Net consultants readily accommodated, as Rowland Sandy clarifies; "Plan-Net were extremely flexible and accommodating, both in terms of their time and budget. From the start, it has been really reassuring to hear Plan-Net citing real world examples of projects they have carried out with other similar companies. Their knowledge is not just theoretical. They clearly know what they are talking about and whatever we throw at them, they have dealt with it before."
Chiltern now has a more focused IT department with a much clearer vision of where it is going. The job is not yet complete but with Plan-Net's help they are progressing towards having a framework in place that is recognisable as ITIL Service Management.
