- The HappySignals' Global IT Experience Benchmark Report
found that speed of service is the number one factor
affecting user happiness.
How can we increase speed of service?
Let's look at some ideas now.
Mean time to repair, or MTTR,
and mean time to fulfill, or MTTF,
measure the same thing.
One for incidents, MTTR, and one for requests, MTTF.
It's the mean time between the initiation of request
to fix an incident or fulfill a request,
and the time when that incident has been fixed,
or that request has been fulfilled.
You want to start by knowing this
for both incidents and requests.
Then you want to start narrowing down
and selecting the incidents
and request cycles you'll want to reduce or crash.
To do so, start by looking at outliers.
These are the workflows
that are the slowest and the fastest.
Make note of why the fastest are fast,
and take some notes on your initial ideas
on how to speed up the slowest of the slow.
Next, look at the workflows that run most frequently.
They must be prime candidates
for speed of service improvement.
Think about it.
If you do about 800 of these a day
and it takes, say 20 minutes to do,
and you can take a minute out of each of them,
wouldn't that make a great deal of difference?
Next, look at those workflows experiencing
the lowest user experience scores.
Surely, these warrant your attention.
Now for the incidents and requests types you've identified
as candidates for improvement,
you'll want to identify all the subcycle time intervals
that make up the overall cycle time.
The example shown on the right is for incidents.
This is a high level list,
so be sure to create your own.
Next, you want to analyze a set of intervals
with an eye towards crashing or reducing the cycle time.
Some criteria for selecting top candidates
for improvement is shown here.
Use a combination of this and other criteria
to prioritize the candidates for improvement,
and then select some
to go into your agile improvement backlog.
Another approach is to use force field analysis,
to brainstorm a set of things you could do.
Here's how it works.
You're here.
You'd like to be somewhere else.
To get there,
you ask, what forces can we add or amplify
to drive towards our goal,
and what barriers are between us and our goal
and how can we minimize or eliminate them?
You can then look at the barriers and enablers
and take actions to minimize or eliminate barriers,
and add or amplify enablers,
putting your resources to work
on the subset of these things
that will give you the greatest bang for your buck.
One current strength
may be the way we provision mobile devices.
It may be lightning fast.
We might identify an action item
to replicate some of the how from that process
to the provisioning of tablets and laptops.
On the weaknesses side,
we might know that we just don't stock enough
of a particular device, which causes delays.
This may be an easy fix.
The beauty of this technique is that everything's in play.
There's no one or small subset of things
that we're looking at,
and it drives out lots of stuff you can do,
including things you might not think of
using other techniques.