Business Service Management

To quickly engage with all of the key representatives involved in providing the SAP management and support services, iCore conducted a series of initial kick-off sessions, which created a shared understanding of the purpose, focus, and approach to the capability review from the very outset.

Immediately after, a series of separate ‘show and tell’ review sessions followed with each of the key representatives to enable a deeper understanding of the current capabilities and challenges being faced.

iCore rapidly established that one of the IT department’s main challenges was a lack of end-to-end visibility of increasing business demand across both the project and operational life cycles. This lack of visibility, combined with different prioritisation schemes within the IT department, made these demands difficult to resource plan effectively. The net effect of this was felt in the ever-increasing pressures within the IT department and the need to continually re-prioritise and divert resources to keep pace with and react to the escalating business needs and demands.

The capability review identified and confirmed to the client the specific areas causing the IT department to suffer through their inability to understand the existing demand and pipeline for future demand for the SAP platform. Based on the review findings, iCore was able to provide a six-month roadmap that would enable the understanding of the variety of business demands and potential service impacts. In turn, this would translate into capacity planning to manage and mitigate any risks to the overall operation of the business.

To identify potential investment requirements in support of any improvements, iCore reviewed the available IT Capacity Management tools against the client’s existing toolsets and platform management strategy. This identified the gaps that must be addressed in the improvement roadmap.

The Capacity Management toolset market review identified to the client that no current immediate investment was required as part of the business case to support the roadmap, as sufficient tools were already in place. Instead, the review identified that the client should continue to develop and invest in the existing toolsets to maximise the currently under-utilised capabilities within them.

The provided roadmap showed the improvement activities necessary to create the required capability within the client’s IT department. A knowledge transfer approach from iCore to the customer’s staff would facilitate the step-change in capability while ensuring that it would be sufficiently embedded within the department.

At each phase, the roadmap clearly focused on the need to provide greater levels of assurance and performance management for the key business transactions and activities that depended on the SAP platform and on building a body of knowledge necessary to support the automation of alerting to enable more timely and increasingly proactive responses from the IT Department to minimise and control Business impacts.