Plan International
A best practice, top down approach to Service Delivery
Founded over 70 years ago, Plan International is one of the oldest and largest international development agencies in the world. It works in 49 developing countries across Africa, Asia and the Americas, directly supporting more than 1.5 million children and their families and indirectly supporting a further 9 million.
As part of a global ICT strategy to continuously develop their IT organisation as a service provider, Plan International undertook a Service Management initiative to ensure that all IT services were underpinned with best practice processes. In order to maintain this, a framework was implemented to continually align those services to business needs.
Plan International decided to engage consultants to advise on a global ICT Service Model. The chosen partner would be required to assist in the creation and implementation of high-level policies and the processes and procedures which would go on to support the core service disciplines of Configuration, Service Desk, Incident, Problem, Change, and Service Level Management.
Plan-Net addressed the requirements of the organisation by taking a best-practice, top down approach to delivery, to be completed in four phases. The first phase would deliver a more organisation aligned and service driven ‘future state' model. Phases Two and Three would define the policies which would go on to govern each process and the procedures aligned to them. Phase Four would involve the definition of roles and responsibilities, measurements and KPIs and production of a full set of process and procedural documentation.
Part of fulfilling the strategic aims of the organisation involved improving operational efficiency and aligning the IT Service Desk to both the existing and future organisation models. This in turn led to an increase in Service Desk effectiveness which had a wide reaching impact across Plan International's entire global operation.
The project directly helped to ensure that (as far as IT operations were concerned) every penny raised could now work as hard as possible. Jon Winder, Global Services Manager at Plan International elaborates;
"Plan International must make best use of all funds that enter the business, so the road to maximum efficiency begins with best-practice ICT. As an organisation we have many remote workers in the field who depend on IT and therefore depend heavily upon the service desk. It is essential for us to ensure our service model is as efficient as possible to allow our staff to concentrate their energies on what they do best - improving the lives of some of the world's poorest children."
A review of the existing business model and ICT organisation established key requirements and business drivers whilst ascertaining constraints and current areas of good practice. Through a number of workshops, one-to-one interviews and tele-conferences with Plan International's senior management, Plan-Net consultants agreed a blueprint for the new service-driven and business-aligned global ICT service model.
Next, the Service Improvement Plan was developed - including the essential defining of policies that would go on to govern each process. This primarily supported the communication and long-term establishment of the processes in scope, and facilitated development of a detailed plan for the remaining phases of the project.
Key to this was ensuring that Plan International's ICT personnel had a clear understanding of the purpose of each process. They could then grasp how the processes interfaced with and depended on one another, and see how they contributed to the ‘bigger picture' of service improvement across the organisation.
Procedures were defined and documented for Incident, Problem, Change, and Service Level Management, in preparation for process establishment. According to Paul Whitlock, Plan-Net's Head of Service Management, this was without doubt the most important phase of the project.
Whitlock and his team knew that the key objective was not merely implementation, but embedding and establishing the new processes and procedures within the day-to-day operations of Plan International. Ultimately ongoing success depended on making meaningful changes, not just putting a best practice wrap over the existing services;
"Implementing best practice is much more than instituting nice statements and idealised notions in the hope that they will filter through to tangible results. Unless what people do changes, any observable benefits cannot last. The key to success is therefore in the details of procedures, and in helping people see why the detail matters. It requires investment, so it is not something that can be skimmed over."
To this end, Plan International staff were trained in managing and employing the processes, regardless of their roles and positions. Plan-Net worked with them to ensure that all key ICT individuals were aware of their specific responsibilities and the best methods to follow in order to meet accountability requirements.
Winder sums up the dramatic improvements seen at Plan International as a direct result of Plan-Net's work;
"We are now able to react much quicker and more efficiently, even with the same resources available to us. We can prioritise our work better and make sure incidents are picked up in the right order. The policies and procedures Plan-Net defined have radically improved how we run the service desk and manage incidents.
Centralising all our procedures has worked really well in ensuring our teams work effectively together on problems as they arise and in finding and resolving underlying issues. Most importantly, our employees in the field have more confidence in the system and are seeing a better overall service, allowing them more time to focus on the children and communities we work with."
