‘IT Stories from the Road’ is a series of first-person stories told by IT professionals. If you’d like to share a story, email us at dexhub@nexthink.com!
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In my prior role as Director of Desktop Engineering at a large, multi-line insurance carrier, we embarked on a journey to replace our reactive IT support model with an approach that was more modern and efficient.
We started by bringing in the Nexthink capability as a Proof of Concept to see if we could collect data on the end user environment and return stability and reliability to the business. Once quickly proving the concept, we purchased coverage for 25% of our environment so we could tactically resolve line of business issues while coming up to speed on the full scope of the product’s capability.
But part of why we were so successful was this overarching concept:
Don’t bring in a new tool because it looks shiny and new, or to just hand out to staff as another tool in the tool belt. It won’t be effective, you won’t get the ROI or other benefit that you expected, and eventually you will stop using it.
Instead, we:
- developed a new set of processes;
- changed the paradigm of the service we provide;
- created a sense of urgency in the improvement of our service; and
- organized ourselves around those changes.
The goals now became sustainable, with formality and longevity, and the tool was merely an enabler to accomplish the bigger mission. But the tool was critical in that it needed to have the right capability and performance characteristics to get the job done.
This approach worked so well that within the span of a few months we purchased an additional 25% so we could cover the full field office population. In this time period, the tactical operation was seeing some strong success, and was resolving wide-spread blue screen issues, along with identifying and resolving memory constraints across the entire field population. It also gave us time to move to a more strategic approach, placing two of our strongest Desktop Support staff into the Command Center to proactively search and destroy underlying issues.
The final step was to purchase licenses that covered 100% of our environment, and with this move we also performed three critical steps:
1 – We trained all 100+ Desktop Support staff with the direction to not just use the tool to help troubleshoot, but to also look across the full enterprise for all other devices that were having the same issue and fix latent issues once and for all. This goal also worked into our performance review goals, which gave our teams an incentive to fix issues that were not being called into the help desk.
2 – Our next step was to reorganize IT around the concept of moving away from reactive services and becoming proactive, and even preventative. We now had a team that was dedicated to Proactive Services. This team took its resources from a Desktop staff that had become more efficient over time to focus even more on finding and resolving issues that were sucking the productivity out of the business. This saved our IT department money since those resolved issues would never be called into the Help Desk, and the cost savings then got passed back to the business in a reduced internal IT charge.
3 – And the final step was when the CTO got fed up with the Proactive Services team and decided to disband the group, not because it was ineffective, but because we were making everyone else look bad. “If this team is proactive, what is everyone else considered?” So, the remaining reactive ops teams – server, storage, network, etc. – were essentially absorbed by Proactive Services and relied on the Nexthink platform and their own existing tools to provide improved services to the company.
We understood early on that any new tool won’t bring returns on its own unless there is a supporting and over-arching process built around it. We also understood that processes require something to support them, and in this case we did it with a defined organization and a killer #DEX platform, which positioned us as true partners with the business rather than being seen as an expensive overhead department.
So how did we fare?
After operationalizing across L1, L2, and L3 support teams, and making incremental progress over the course of about a year, we achieved an 80% reduction in the inbound, reactive ticket volumes that our help desk and support teams needed to respond to. And to monetize the outcome, at $5 for each L1 ticket the savings was $2.5M per year. That’s not including savings at L2 and L3, or within the business where the technology improvement really matters!