Service and Organizational Design
TEAM: Nathalie Howell + Gretchen Hütt
The Company
Soporte Crítico is a company that monitors electronic devices and data centers of other companies. The department in charge of this is called NOC (Network Operation Center).
The Problem
The NOC has overgrown in recent years so it was necessary to review their daily tasks and also explore how they could improve their service to end customers.
Normally, theory is very different from reality.
We needed to check
First things first: What do they do?
We started by interviewing each of the employees so that they could describe to us step by step, each of the processes they carry out.
Theory vs Reality
We compared what they told us they were doing, versus what official flowcharts say they do.
How do they do it?
It is important to understand how they carry out the processes. By analyzing the interfaces, it is possible to detect many aspects where there is room for improvement.
A department is not an island
You can't analyze one department without examining what they do for other departments. It was crucial to see the connections they had with their colleagues.
A department is not an island, services can't work in silos
Informal tasks or favors can have a significant impact on processes, and it is crucial that everything is always mapped, including what employees see as 'irrelevant.'
Is there any difference inside the department?
Why behaviors can change? It is important to analyze the reasons that may cause employees to execute processes differently.
Visualize what is happening
After learning and understanding everything that was going on, it was necessary to be able to see it. For example, for the 1st time, you could look at the differences between the night shift and the day shift.
After all we have observed and analyzed, we offer a series of recommendations, categorized and with their own justification. Plus a work plan to let our client know where to start. The results were revealing and widely used for the company. We were able to make it clear that the NOC had to be restructured.