So you have
decided to implement Problem Management….
The key
question that your leadership is going to ask is “How much will this cost me?”
The question that should be asked, or rather how this should be perceived is “how much
money can we save or even re-appropriate to other activities?”
This
discussion doesn’t come without some research. You really need to be able to
determine the return on investment for Problem Management. Depending on the
maturity of your organization you may have an easier time determining accurate
numbers to provide your leadership team.
The first
step in marketing this is for everyone to understand what Problem Management is
all about. There may be many perceptions on what it is for but this is the
perfect opportunity to showcase what it is meant to accomplish. you will also
want to highlight some of the key savings which include:
- Avoiding repeating incidents
- A reduction in Incident durations through handling
- Increased first call resolution
- Reducing business outages
- Customer satisfaction (while this is not a direct cost, you can’t really put a price on a happy customer)
Now that you
know which key stats to start with you need to figure out the cost savings for
each. This is where it can get a bit tricky. Depending again on your
organizations maturity you may (or may not) have the ability to pull metrics to
calculate the dollars and cents.
You will need
to know, even if roughly, the labour costs for the support team(s) so you can
translate this to a salary/minute. You will also need to know what the cost of
the service outages are. this may involve discussions with business units to
determine what the service uptime is worth.
Once you have
these numbers you should be able to roughly calculate the savings for each of
the items above based on what the estimated percentage of Problems generated
would be.
Once you have
the amount of savings it will be easier to determine (and justify) whether you
require a Problem Management person, team, or function.
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Labels: Continual Service Improvement, iti, ITSM, Problem Management, Service Management