Tips on IT Demand Management
We had a ‘voice of customer’ feedback that our ERP report development took too long, so we called for a review of the end-to-end process from request initiation to report delivery. From a development point of view, everything looks fine; there may be room for improvement here and there. What was singled out as the root cause was, the team has been too-focused with accepting enhancement requests from the customers and delivering as fast as they could. There was a lack of expectation setting with the customer on when the work could be delivered. Upon submission of the request, the next time the customer hears from the team is validation of the report.
A recommendation was made to improve the visibility and communication to the customers within the process.
- Upon submission of the request, the customer should have an idea of where the request sits in the queue. Based on the average delivery metrics, the customers could be advised on the estimated delivery period of the request.
- A weekly status update of the requests in queue will be published in public and available to all who are interested in a syndicated manner.
- At each milestone of the development stages (e.g. design, development, testing), the customer should receive a notification from the team.
A key lesson here – IT folks tend to focus on working on the task and tend to neglect the fact that IT service consumers are no different from passengers in an airport; they want to be kept informed on the status of the flight (on the TV screen or radio announcements) after they checked in and until they have boarded the plane – communication and visibility to managing the expectations is key to customer satisfaction.
Before I end off the topic, I would like to make a note that the above points 2 & 3 might be potential content for a enterprise aggregator tool like netvibes.
