Service Planning

This area is focused on the key elements of preparation for launching and ongoing management of services, whether it is designed for internal or external “customers”.  Taking the time in advance to plan strategies for how to handle on-going operations helps optimize the customer experience as well as the financial performance of the organization.

Customer Centricity will work as part of your team to help you identify the appropriate strategies that are right for you.  We’ll also help refine your planning processes to help shorten the time to market while improving quality of the end service.

Capacity & Continuity Planning

• Capacity Management - Ensuring that the resources necessary to meet the agreed customer requirements are economically provided.  Includes meeting requirements such as:  transaction volume, processing time and response time.  Considers the current baseline of work and impact based on forecast.
• Availability Management - Ensuring the availability of services as specified by the customer.  Requires a low error or failure rate.  Maximum benefit is realized by the reliability of services and the ability to maintain the service delivery infrastructure.
• Service Continuity - Safeguarding the performance of services in any eventuality based on planning and implementation of preventative measures.  Includes defining plans which enable the service provider to respond to business disrupting events in such a way that there is minimal to no impact on the client.  Is connected with a broader business continuity management (BCM) plan.

Financial Management

• Financial Planning - Identifying, calculating, monitoring and allocating costs for the provided services.  Through cost awareness, management can influence the behavior of users and customers that determine the costs for services provided.  Finally, provides for the basis of budget planning
• Logistics, Warehousing & Distribution Strategies - Effectively managing all activities involved in obtaining and managing raw materials and component parts, finished products, through packaging and distribution, ensuring that each is available, in the most cost-effective manner, at the right place, at the right time.
• Outsourcing Strategies - Ensuring that the organization focuses on its core competencies.  Where significant resources are expended on activities that do not represent core competencies, consider if it makes sense to outsource to a firm that specializes on that particular area.  Example:  A wholesale provider of internet access begins offering a highly profitable consumer-based service.  This new offering requires the company to provide end-user support.  Outsourcing the service desk / contact center may be an appropriate approach to enable the firm to focus on the core competency of managing the network, and not a contact center.
• Asset Management - Effectively collecting and maintaining a comprehensive list of items owned by a company such as hardware and software. This data is used in connection with the financial aspects of ownership such as calculating the total cost of ownership, depreciation, licensing, maintenance, and insurance.

Systems Planning

• Systems Architecture - Ensuring that a company is leveraging commercially-available off the shelf (COTS) packages if/where appropriate.
• Security Management - Defining and maintaining a security policy that ensures:  confidentiality is appropriately preserved, information maintains a high level of integrity, information availability, transactions are not denied, and obligations imposed by law or contractual arrangements can be fulfilled.