Since I’ve only worked in one health care environment (it being my current job), I’m trying to find the best way to build a category list for use in a ticketing system. So far I’m following the thoughts that it’s going to be best to consider a health care service as a top level branch followed by a description of the Service failure. I think it’s a great idea to consider Services in a category listing (I do not claim to have thought that one up myself), but how descriptive do we need to be when it comes to listing Services for a hospital? This is where it’s important to know “The Business” for ITIL, because I’m essentially asking the question of “what is it that people do at the hospital?” I can consider that they admit, transfer and discharge patients, chart information in the EMR, order diagnostics or treatments for patients, schedule appointments and even handle billing for patients. So this may be the best place to start when it comes to building a category list. Answer the question “what does the business do?” and go from there.
Right now my manager is working on improving the first call resolution (FCR) rate for our Service Desk. A very critical part of this improvement is to understand the types of calls that the Service Desk is taking and determining what’s being escalated and why. Here’s the problem though; the category list that we use is too generic and it’s difficult to easily find trends in the data. To try and overcome this challenge I’m pulling a report of where the escalated tickets are being assigned so we can take view the categories (even if they’re too generic) and start drilling down into the data to find improvements. After looking through some of the escalated Incidents, I think the ITIL process we should be implementing to improve the FCR is Knowledge Management. A large portion of the calls are either “how do I…” types of questions or the system is functioning correctly, but the user made a mistake in their work-flow. I definitely think that other actions will need to take place to improve the FCR, such as a change in responsibilities and roles for the Service Desk. First thing is first though, and that is implementing a Knowledge Management solution to empower the Service Desk with information they need to help the users. At the end of the day an improvement of FCR isn’t just about proving we have a great team at the Service Desk, but it’s also about making sure our customers are happy with the service.
The Webster dictionary defines important as viagra without a prescription “marked by or indicative of significant worth or consequence : valuable in content or relationship.” let’s take the first part of this definition “marked by”, it appears that many of use mark what is important and what is not. Going with the post “Bubble” culture, we are marked by our roles and within that role define what is important. Now, the Support Center is extremely important because they take on a lot of the volume calls that either are resolved by them or routed to the correct group. Our Tier 2 or 3 groups determine if such a ticket is important. How is this determined? We would all like to know… Working in a business environment were our end-users are 24/7 would first think that their concerns are important, but when working with IT groups our role allows use to mark what is.
With identifying what is important we lose the aspect of the culture that was bound by us to uphold. Remembering that we work for a business that must have focus on its clients. Instead we focus on what is best for us for any given day. So next time remember when receiving concerns from clients that it isn’t about what you see as important. It is important to the client.
I’ll keep this post short and to the point; beware of the “Bubble Culture.” My manager also referred to this as “The Silo’s,” but even though a silo may be a better metaphor, I like the idea of bubbles. First, the word “bubble” is just more fun to say, and second, as difficult as it can be to change a culture I feel that identifying a change as a hardened, concrete structure can be more discouraging then thinking of simply popping a barrier and letting the contents (in this case people) wake to the shock of what’s outside. So what is this “Bubble Culture” I’m referring about? Quite simply, it’s the idea that the technical talent (a.k.a., just about everyone that’s not on the Service Desk), lives inside a bubble and they don’t have any interactions with anyone else; even with other roles in the department. At my current job we’re in the middle of fighting a Bubble Culture, and these bubbles aren’t very easy to break. It’s easy to assign an issue (Incident, Request, etc.) to someone in a bubble, but if there’s something wrong, such as information not being correct or missing, the person in the bubble would prefer to just send the issue back to the Service Desk to gather everything. As great as it sounds to have the Service Desk be a total Single Point of Contact; it’s just not realistic where I work. By the time the issue travels back to the Service Desk technician and the technician is actually made aware of it and eventually gets around to contacting the user, the technical analyst probably could have just contacted the user directly and had everything resolved. Not only does busting the bubble have to do with increasing communication between analysts and users, but often incorrectly assigned tickets will travel back to the Service Desk, often to (again) be incorrectly assigned and more time being spent with getting the issue to where it needs to go. Usually such actions can be avoided if the bubbles are just gone and a technical analyst walks over twenty feet to talk with the person they think that can actually resolve the problem and just get the ticket resolved. So this bubble not only prevents communication but it’s depriving the entire department of efficiency, ruining the positive customer service the user would like to receive, and ultimately just wasting energy by wasting time. So when getting ready to put improvements in place, be it ITIL, Lean, Six Sigma, etc., be ready to bust some bubbles. The people living in them may get a shock when they’re nice and cozy little atmosphere changes, but we’re talking about changing a culture to provide better service, not just keeping everyone all nice and comfy.
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