Quantifying Pain and Situational Fluency

Prompter
Contents
Pain: High cost of outages............................................................................................................................. 1
Pain: High Mean Time to Resolution ............................................................................................................ 2
Pain: Cost of Operations ............................................................................................................................... 3
Pain: Low Satisfaction with IT Department................................................................................................... 4

Pain: High cost of outages

Pain High Cost of Outages
Job Title Application Manager, Director of IT, CxO
Industry
Offering OO Advanced Services – Event Automation Module
Questions to quantify What is the cost of downtime?
value How much downtime do you have?
Do you track these metrics as KPI’s (key performance indicators)?
Notes  The ‘high cost of outages’ has many causes, some of which are solved
with other solutions. This document doesn’t go into great detail, and
simply refers you to cross-selling opportunities.

Reasons Capabilities
Could a reason be because… Today…? Would it help if…? (when, who, what, so)
Outages have a high MTTR (mean time to When an outage occurs, Your operations teams
resolution)? could resolve the outage faster, so the MTTR was
 You don’t detect the outage quickly (cross-sell lower.
BSM/monitoring)?
 It takes the operations team too long to
resolve outages.
Changes are creating outages Cross sell ITSM and Change Management
 Do you have change management practices?
 Can you quantify how many outages are
caused by changes?
You don’t have an event monitoring system in Cross sell BSM
place to detect outages?
Pain: High Mean Time to Resolution
Pain High Mean Time to Resolution
Job Title IT Operations Manager
Industry
Offering OO Advanced Services – Event Automation Module
Questions to quantify What is your MTTR?
value How many events do you have?
Do you track these metrics as KPI’s (key performance indicators)?
Reasons
Could a reason be because… Today…?
Operators are busy handling other issues
 Do operators have a runbook that documents
troubleshooting and resolution best practices
for procedures for common event types?
 How long before your operators can respond
to events?
 How long do operators spend working on each
event?
It takes too long to troubleshoot the event
 Do you have a runbook? Does it include
procedures to gather data and troubleshoot
standard problems?
 How long does it take to gather data and
troubleshoot the incident?
 How many people get involved?
Operators need to involve administrators to solve
problems
 How long does it take to get an administrator?
 Does the administrator use a script or
standard procedure to resolve the problem?
 Do you operators have permissions to run
administrative scripts to troubleshoot or
resolve problems?
 Would you trust operators with a small,
securely delegated set of scripts that ran with
Capabilities
Would it help if…? (when, who, what, so)
When events came in, Operators could consult a
runbook that documented what to do so they
could quickly handle the event manually? [Cross
sell additional BSM or TS Consulting services to
build a runbook]
When events come in, operators could click a
button to run a workflow that implements the
runbook procedures, so operators significantly
reduced the amount of time they spend on each
event?
When events come in, a tool automatically
launched a workflow that implements your
runbook procedures, so runbook procedures are
executed automatically for many events?
When an event comes in, an application would
automatically gather appropriate data and/or
attempt to resolve the problem, so some incidents
would be resolved automatically while other
incidents would have necessary data to identify
the likely causes?
When events require administrator authority,
Operators could perform a well-defined set of
actions as Administrator (including logging the
action and notifying administrators) so they didn’t
need to wait for Administrators to resolve events?
 administrator privileges?
Operators are working on wrong (lower priority or
false positive) problems
 Does your monitoring tool (1) understand
which components (servers, databases, apps,
etc.) make a service and (2) prioritize based on
the priority of these services? [Cross sell
uCMDB, BSM]
 Do you have information, like a database or
spreadsheet of servers that would help
prioritize these events?
When an event came in, a tool automatically
looked up information in a database/spreadsheet
you manage, and modified the event priority
automatically, so so operators could quickly see a
more accurate event priority. [Again, BSM/uCMDB
also play in this space. If this is a problem,
consider bringing in a BSM specialist to see which
solution best fits the customer needs.]

Pain: Cost of Operations

Pain Cost of Operations
Job Title CIO, Director of Operations
Industry
Offering OO Advanced Services – Multiple options
Questions to quantify How many operators?
value What types of tasks are they doing? What is the cost for doing these tasks?
Notes Cost of operations is a complex pain with many causes, and this document
can’t focus on all problems that might increase cost of operations. If
someone is willing to talk about cost of operations, consider pulling in a
business consultant to do an ROI study or transformation study.

Reasons
Could a reason be because… Today…?
You have too much staff?
 Do operators perform many manual activities?
 Do you have too many administrators for the
number of servers you manage? [possible
cross-sell of other automation tools]
 Each department or line of business is
independent and duplicates functionality of
the other departments? [cross-sell TS
Consulting – transformation/organization]
You have too many expensive administrators?
 Your administrators can’t securely delegate
tasks to operators?
You don’t understand the most effective ways to
reduce IT costs?
 You don’t track key performance metrics that
impact cost?
 You don’t track the impact of projects on key
metrics that impact cost?
Capabilities
Would it help if…? (when, who, what, so)
When IT must take action, operators have a library
of tested routines so they can use automated
routines instead of doing things manually.
When IT must take action, operators have a library
of tested, delegated routines, so operators can run
select administrative tasks without having
administrative access.
When evaluating project success, you had easily
measured success metrics that relate directly to IT
cost.
When considering IT cost reduction, you have a
study or roadmap that outlines your IT strengths
and weakness, so you can focus on effectively
 You don’t know what improvements you can managing costs?
make that would have the most impact on
your cost?

Pain: Low Satisfaction with IT Department

Pain Low Satisfaction with IT Department (customers, users, or other lines of
business)
Job Title CIO, sometimes an IT Director
Industry
Offering OO Advanced Services – mostly Service Request Fulfillment
Questions to quantify How do you measure customer/user satisfaction?
value Do you have performance goals to improve customer/user satisfaction?
Notes This section uses the term ‘users’ as a generic for end-users, customers,
other departments, etc.
There are too many potential causes for poor customer satisfaction; this
section focuses on causes related to this solution. HP has potential
solutions built around the SRC (service request catalog), ITSM
(problem/change management), BSM (event monitoring), etc.

Reasons
Could a reason be because… Today…?
It takes too long to fulfill user requests to IT
 Too many common user requests are fulfilled
manually?
 User requests are all customized, so are hard
to automate?
 User requests don’t have the appropriate
information, so there’s a lot of back-and-forth
to get the information necessary to complete
the request.
Capabilities
Would it help if…? (when, who, what, so)
When a user submits a request, the user
completes the request electronically so that (1)
the request is more likely to have the necessary
information, and (2) the user is more likely to pick
a request that is automated.