A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A SERVICE DELIVERY MANAGER

The Service Delivery Manager role is a busy and enjoyable role.

Every day starts with a management Service Desk review where I can determine the health of the Service Desk.  Real-time data on our Service Dashboards gives me a quick insight into everything that is happening so I can gauge the current climate, and make informed decisions and allocate appropriate resources.  The morning is often spent making plans with the team, and helping with their next actions on sticky support issues.  The Service Desk health is carefully monitored throughout the day to ensure we are progressing through the workload efficiently.  We know what our end target is every day, so if we are not within acceptable thresholds we’ll quickly make a plan to rectify.  As you can imagine, it is critical we end the day in a good place because with Support it’s a certainty that more tickets will come in the next day adding to the previous day’s unresolved total, so if we aren’t on top of our tickets on a daily basis, our workload could quickly become unsustainable.

Constantly reviewing and improving the quality and efficiency of the team, to ensure we always deliver an excellent Service, is the top priority.  Traditional support is naturally very reactive, which means every day is different and it can be hard to predict how much capacity each team member has at any given moment, it only takes one major unexpected support ticket to impact everyone’s day. A big part of my role is working with our processes, products and people to develop new and improved ways of working to reduce the amount of reactive support we do; a more proactive approach helps us gain control over the quantity of reactive support we have to deal with. We are currently in the process of implementing new delivery areas within the services team to focus on ways we can effectively reduce the number of reactive tickets that are logged which will result in providing our customers with an enhanced end user experience.

Using our business intelligence data tools, part of the proactive teams role is to look for patterns and recurring issues and to ask the philosophical question “knowing what we know now, what could we have done to stop this ticket being logged?”. This is an important question that can lead us down a few different avenues. For repeated issues, one of three conclusions could be drawn; either a configuration change is required or perhaps a new product or service might be needed, or there is a training requirement for us to manage.  Sometimes we may develop self-healing automation processes which, after sufficient testing, could be rolled out as a preventative measure to all our managed devices giving all our  clients the benefits of our proactive work.  All of this positive effort helps improve our knowledge and efficiency within the services team, ultimately resulting in an enhanced end user experience to all our customers.

Our latest investment in the team involves a concept called “Gamification”. We have had pulse feedback solutions in place for a while where clients can click happy or sad on every completed ticket, however, we have updated our system to include Gamification where the guys get points for every positive feedback they get, a natural evolution in my eyes.  We are at the stage of developing rewards for the team and they’ve come up with some great ideas so far.   Very simply, points accrued can be saved up and exchanged for rewards of their choosing.  Ideas we have so far range from free lunches, 2 hour lunch breaks to various gadgets.  I am really excited by this addition, and how it will add an extra dynamic for encouraging and rewarding the team.

So to summarise, my role at Select Technology is varied, often fast paced and very rewarding.  Of course as part of my role to continually strive to improve our service, I’m always keen to hear from our clients first-hand about their experience of our Service, and I’d love to hear from you, so feel free to drop me a line anytime.

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