DWS Service Desk Rescue Series: The 16 Upline Management & 4 Governance Systems To Drive Operational Stability

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Establishing an effective upline management and governance system is critical to success for any business, but especially for those with a complex or matrix organizational structure. The senior leadership team must develop and implement a clear set of rules and protocols that will ensure decisions are made efficiently and effectively across all levels of the organization.
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Maintaining a proper perspective on what's important is crucial when it comes down to deciding how best to handle certain situations or issues which may arise within your company over short periods rather than long-term plans because sometimes quick decisions must get made without much information available at hand.

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As we have done in the previous blogs, let’s pick one of the processes and drill down further into it to understand it better. Let’s explore the cross-department management process in further detail.

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The Cross-Department Management process is designed to develop strong working relationships with other teams, and, ensure a collaborative approach to meeting the department’s goals and objectives. The process aims to identify high-volume teams that work is typically done with, identify teams generating a high volume of issues, understand other teams' objectives and requirements, establish D.O.U’s, schedule regular meetings, create issues and action logs, and establish a communication plan. The Objective of the process is to establish better communications between the teams, enable better teaming, and quicker resolution of the issues.

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Let’s review the details of the UpLine Management systems.

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UM1- Financial (Billing, Revenue, Cost, and GP) Management

The objective of the Financial Management process is to Improve the attainment of Revenue, GP, and Cost targets. Improve the Budgeting process that can establish future requirements to deliver IT services. Improved accounting of cost expenditures to support IT services. Improved Chargeback process to allow IT to charge for services provided.

UM2- Service Level Management

The objective of the Service Level Management process is to maintain and improve IT service quality, through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring and reporting upon IT Service achievements and initiation of actions to eradicate poor service, in line with business or cost justification. Through these methods, a better relationship between IT and its customers/users can be developed. 

UM3- Customer Relationship Management

The objective of the Customer Relationship Management process is to ensure IT and Business are fully aware of each other, understand each other’s requirements and have a regular and open relationship in furthering the partnership. 

UM4- Business Controls Management

The objective of the Business Controls, Compliance, and Security Management ensures that compliance with legal obligations and compliance with the organization’s own information security standards are being met.

UM5- Cross-Department Management

The objective of the Cross Department Management Process is to develop strong working relationships with other departments and ensure a collaborative approach is taken to meeting the departments and organization’s goals and objectives.

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UM6- Vendor Management

The objective of the Vendor Management process ensures all vendor relationships are managed effectively and vendor performance is managed, tracked and optimized for the attainment of service levels.

UM7- Crisis Management

The objective of the Crisis Management process is to develop a plan to deal with a crisis before, during, and after a client-impacting event. Ensure teams are appropriately trained, staffed, and ready to respond with a sense of urgency. 

UM8- Delivery Excellence Management

The Objective of the Delivery Excellence Management process is to create a framework to assess the health of current teams. Drive continual improvement, improve quality metrics, improve productivity, and improve customer experience.

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Let’s continue with the review of the UpLine Management systems.

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UM9- Global Delivery Management

The objective of the Global Delivery Management process ensures that the on-shore teams establish the right level of management and governance systems, which are based on audit compliant reporting and measurements systems, to manage the services being delivered out of global locations.

UM10- New Business, Growth, and RFS Management

The objective of the Growth Management process is to define the methodology to conduct due diligence for adding new features and functionalities to products and services and acquire new businesses, size and scope the opportunities, and transition the new business into the existing environment in a seamless way. 

UM11- Risk Management

The objective of the Risk Management process is to identify vulnerabilities and threats to the information resources used by the organization in achieving business objectives and decide what countermeasures, if any, to take, in reducing risk to an acceptable level, based on the value of the information resource to the organization.

UM12- Contract Management

The objective of the Contract Management process is to ensure contracts are written in a clear and concise manner and executed after undergoing all necessary reviews and approvals. Ensure a governance system is implemented to manage the contract execution and any misalignment or execution issues are identified, documented, and mitigated.

UM13- Account Governance

The objective of the Account Governance process is to ensure that the process executed by the account team has the necessary organizational structures in place to successfully manage the contract. 

UM14- Issues and Escalations Management

The objective of the Issues And Escalation Management Process is to ensure an issues and escalation management system is defined, agreed to by all parties, well understood, and executed as per the design. It Ensures that not only real escalations are raised and sent to the right person/group to act upon, but that unnecessary time and effort is not wasted dealing with the escalation versus resolving the issue.

UM15- Transition & Transformation Management

The objective of the Transition & Transformation Management process ensures that there is a structured way to transition services/work into the team and then to transform it to derive efficiencies.

UM16- Key Initiatives Management

The Objective of the Key Initiatives Management ensures that key projects have the appropriate governance around them to ensure success.

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Now, let's take a look at the 4 governance systems.

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GOV1- Steering Committee

The objective of the Steering Committee process is designed to ensure that a committee that is comprised of senior executives is providing strategic direction. They are supporting the program to which they are overseeing, and, helping to steer the program from start to finish. 

GOV2- Joint Innovation Council

The objective of the Joint Innovation Council Process is to is designed to ensure that teams are meeting at defined intervals, typically quarterly, to develop ideas via innovation workshops. The Council is comprised of Subject Matter Experts and Research and Industry leads. They define projects of interest and ensure that there is sustained and ongoing innovation in the services being delivered. 

GOV3- Governance Meetings

The objective of the Governance Meetings process is to ensure that senior leaders are meeting on a monthly basis to review the service quality, performance improvements, financials and contract health. They collaborate to improve customer experience and drive performance improvements. 

GOV4- Monthly Operational Meetings

The objective of the Monthly Operational Meetings Process ensures that the overall health of the IT service is in line with contractual expectations and all stakeholders are fully informed. The MORprocess can serve as a mechanism to not only keep all parties in sync with the overall operational performance across a defined set of measurements but also serves as a vehicle to build stronger relationships.

For a detailed explanation of each of these processes feel free to take a look at the book, journey to a unified delivery model, a framework for conducting operational health checks. The management whisperer series.