How to have healthy, meaningful disputes with your IT service provider
Posted on 29 October, 2020 by Andrew Lenti
Go Back10 CTQ (critical to quality) factors to help set expectations between you and your IT service provider and ensure that quality is kept at centre stage
Originally published on LinkedIn here on 29 October 2020
This October marks our 5-year anniversary as a SaaS provider offering a wide array of continuous improvement and performance governance consulting services supported by our enterprise platform PRESTO Continuous Improvement.
One of the major areas of learning that has brought us through the ranks of the wonderful world of 'software as a service' has been our ongoing internal continuous improvement philosophy to keep our daily operations and product development activities as streamlined and efficient as possible.
We have been with several 3rd party service providers over the years outsourcing the majority of our product development program. In doing so, we have developed a few hacks to allow for our relationship with our talented designers and developers to be optimised. As a small company, we are specifically focused on keeping all costs under watch and keeping our clients satisfied. That said, it goes without saying that quality governance is a key success factor engrained in our daily operations.
With Covid-19 in full effect, even our developers are now working from home full time causing new challenges in connectivity and employee availability. To say the least however, our daily KPIs which we have been using for over 3 years are all still as valid as ever and assist us in maintaining daily discipline and adherence to quality while giving the team the flexibility needed so that everyone can work at their own pace without unnecessary distractions.
Speaking the language of Quality
Some time ago, I published an article on the daily KPIs that we use to track performance and quality levels. As a provider of KPI management solutions, I would be the first to highlight that no KPIs will ever be effective if they are not reviewed consistently and discussed among the key decision makers required to improve KPI results and communicated to key stake holders.
Although we track many daily KPIs both at the team and at the personal level, all of these are mere support information when creating our monthly performance report which we delivery and discuss consistently with our development partner.
This report is crucial to highlight chronic issues, identify areas of improvement, and of course, dispute a bill in the unfortunate event that you feel your service provider should offer service credits due to targets which were not met.
Without further explanation, the list below consists of our 10 CTQ (critical to quality) factors viewed through our classic T-O-P-P framework which we find priceless when engaging long-distant service providers to discuss challenges and improvement areas.
In the attached DOWNLOADABLE TEMPLATE are additional detailed explanations and sample graphs to make your discussions all the more meaningful.
Wishing you all the best in your outsourcing endeavors and feel free to contact us in the event you would like enhanced support in managing quality with your remote relationships.
Andrew Lenti, TOPP TI CEO
Technology
- 01Product uptime - number of hours where IT products were available to clients for use
- 02Connectivity - Represents the quality of communication and the effectiveness of the devices used (e.g. laptops, mobile devices, chat, etc.) to ensure that the assigned work is completed
- 03Legacy code reliability & performance - Represents the consistency of the product released in production & user experience and how much time is dedicated to unexpected rework on code already delivered, lost code, performance issues from poorly constructed queries, etc.
Organisation
- 04Availability of staff - Represents the number of hours dedicated to the work schedule agreed in the prior month
- 05Communication & collaboration among the team - Represents the quality in which the team members communicate among themselves to optimise the daily hand offs of work from colleague to colleague while minimising downtime & confusion
- 06Overall organisation and ability to plan future tasks - the overall organisation of the team to ensure that each product deliverable agreed, is managed effectively up until completion
Product (process)
- 07Quality of deliverables received - Represents the level of quality of work completed and delivered to client for testing and/or client delivery
- 08Quickness on delivery - Represents the overall quickness from the time a single task is identified and the time it is completed
People
- 09Responsiveness & concentration - How responsive and focused the staff is in the day-to-day management of phone calls, messages, etc.
- 10Knowledge of the product - How confident the developers are in making a commitment to a new work order based on their estimated required time for R&D activities
Download the complete monthly quality assessment dispute template here
Read the original article posted here on LinkedIn
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