The Poor Customer Service Rating

The scenario

The IT department at ACME Widgets just received their annual customer service rating.  As part of this survey, business executives were asked to rate the value provided by IT. On a scale of 100, they scored a 29.  The Project Management Office (PMO) has been tasked with increasing this score to a 45 over the next 18 months.  Prior to Mark’s arrival 3 years ago, there were no standard processes within the Application Development group of IT, each team was free to define their own processes.  The result of this was most applications were fairly low quality, resulting in a high number of complaints from the users about the applications not working or not meeting their needs.  Under the guidance the Mark, the IT department has built what they believe to be a solid and efficient process based on industry best practices.  Mark had also established a Project Management Office to oversee adherence to these processes across all application development teams.  This was the first survey to be completed since these changes were fully implements, so Mark had been anxiously awaiting these survey results and was stunned at the poor numbers.

The Players

Stan: An analyst with the Project Management Office charged with making improvements to the existing application development process

Beth: The director of the PMO.  She has ownership of raising the value rating to 45 over the next 18 months.  Stan reports to Beth

Mark: The CIO.  Beth repots to Mark

What typically happens now

After meeting with Beth and receiving her new project, Stan eagerly sets out to solve the problem.  The first place Stan turns is to the internet to search for a better best practice, after all since the processes were based upon industry best practices surely someone else has had the same experience and solved the problem.

What should happen

The entire idea of the IT department having to distribute a Customer Service Survey shows part of the failure.  If the business units are your customer, then that makes you their vendor.  Vendors are external and typically (though not always) brought in to perform a specific task or solve a specific problem.  Many times vendors are also perceived as being concerned with their own self interest first.  The entire concept of the business unit being a customer implies that IT is not a trusted partner and automatically places barriers in peoples minds.  Instead, IT should be a partner with the business unit and seen as supporting the overall goal of the business (which is to make money).  If IT is seen as a partner, you do not need a survey to tell you how much value you are providing, you are witnessing it every day, it is ingrained in your culture.

The next problem is how Stan sets out to solve to come up with a solution and the over reliance on best practices.  There are a variety of numbers around what percentage of IT projects fail, I have never seen one below 60% and most seem to be in the neighborhood of 70 - 80%.  If best practices are truly best practices, then why do so many projects fail?  If IT were a partner with the business, instead of turning to best practices to solve his problem Stan would have turned to the business.  Then he would have discovered that the process improvements they implemented, while increasing the quality of the applications also increased the average project time from 12 to 18 months.  As a result of this, the business was unable to implement process changes that would allow them to increase their capacity, which resulted in lower revenue.  In this case the process changes actually hurt the real goal – to make money.  So instead of heading off to research to more industry best practices, Stan should have headed to the business unit and discovered what the real problem was.  Then his next focus would be to analyze the IT processes and determine how the efficiency could be increased while preserving a high level of quality.