Integration in Mars IS Service Service Desk Royal Canin
In this publication, we will talk about how Mars IS managed in six months to implement a project to integrate the first level of IT service support for Royal Canin users. Royal Canin technical support was transferred from Emarg in southern France to Stupino.
Since 2006, the User Support Center (Mars Service Desk) in the city of Stupino has been providing IT support for Mars employees on a 24-hour, seven-day-per-week basis. In addition to their native Russian, the service staff speak English, French and German.
The Service Desk of Royal Canin in Emarg consisted of four specialists supporting 1300 French employees. They also supported local IT teams in other countries. Almost all Mars IS teams were involved in the project. To work in it, it was necessary to find people with French and English languages, as well as knowledge in the field of IT or, at least, with a great desire to build a career in this field. In addition to interaction with recruitment agencies, we have established friendly relations with several Russian language universities. The training for beginners consisted of a three-week introductory course at the Mars Service Desk and two weeks of active work on receiving user calls, followed by an internship in France.
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The project consisted of five areas: People, Knowledge, Tools, Processes and Communications.
At the first stage, a team of seven analysts was formed. The first participant came from an already existing team and controlled the process of knowledge transfer: he helped train new employees, distributed resources, working with escalating user requests, and tracked overall results.
In the first three months, six more people were recruited. The selection criterion was a good knowledge of English and French, focus on results and ability to learn. In addition to the general team, each participant had personal goals aimed at developing functional and leadership competencies.
After three weeks of training and two weeks of operating work, each newcomer joined the team, while continuing to learn. Together with the operating activities, participants tried to build effective interaction with second-level teams.
In the process of project implementation, we paid great attention to identifying key individuals. For example, working groups were organized with second-tier application and infrastructure support teams. All new employees were provided with travel-friendly laptop models. And the Telecoms team helped build a tunnel between Mars and Royal Canin, which allowed them to quickly connect to local resources and users' computers.
With the help of interviewing existing teams in France and Russia, a list of technologies was compiled that needed to be picked up for support. The list was replenished throughout the project implementation time.
New employees joined already working teams, watched their work, listened to calls and asked questions. It was originally planned that the articles for the knowledge base will make up the members of teams of the second and third levels. However, the writing of such texts took a lot of time, and their language was too difficult for the first level employees. As a result, we asked the experts to tell about the solutions used by the business, and the members of the first-level teams wrote down and asked clarifying questions.
Documented solutions were checked by experts and entered into the knowledge base. It was decided that if the service department does not have information about a particular solution after the start of work, it will escalate the incident to the next level without trying to solve it. In the first weeks after launch, this approach helped fill out the knowledge base.
Great assistance in the operational launch of the service was provided by express internships in various departments, including in production. Analysts were able to see how IT solutions support business processes.
In parallel with the training, a list of the necessary tools and access points that employees should have was compiled, as well as the configuration of the remote infrastructure.
We have compiled a list of IT processes that require the participation of Service Desk, as well as requests that have traditionally been performed by the first-level support service, who are not in the area of ​​responsibility of the new service department. We also agreed on the creation of a team to issue equipment and work with incidents that require physical manipulation of the equipment.
The communication was built in two directions: informing the IT hub teams about the project progress and working with users, which includes an advertising campaign and training for working remotely with Service-Desk. The advertising campaign included internal communications: presentations, videos, posters, distribution of news about the implementation stages of the Service Desk.
Mars Service Desk's work was built on ITIL practices: Incident Management, Request Fulfilment and Knowledge Management. Agreements on the level of service provision (SLA) were reached, technologies and processes included in the team’s area of ​​responsibility were identified, scenarios of interaction between teams were considered and rules were developed according to which it proceeds.
The Major Incident Management process was not overlooked, although the Service Desk team does not require significant participation in it. We identified which incidents could qualify for MIM, and which teams are responsible for the steps in this process. In particular, the responsibility of the first level service department included the diagnosis of the incident and the collection of information necessary to determine the extent of its impact on the business. The interaction with users and the involvement of the resources necessary for solving the incident has come within the competence of the second-level support team.
The team responsible for their functioning in Mars provided us with invaluable assistance in implementing ITSM processes. Existing formal and informal processes have been studied in detail, compared with their counterparts in Mars and with the description in ITIL. We developed the implementation of each solution in the ITSM tool together. It is worth noting that although we tried to reproduce as much as possible the methods of work adopted and proven in Mars, the various elements of the processes were edited in accordance with the recommendations of ITIL and taking into account the realities of business. We also decided not to hurry with the introduction of a single tool for registering complaints.
The first calls started coming to Russia on December 1, 2012. For the first three months, we were able to meet the requirements for several key performance indicators: the coefficient of solving the problem during the first call (First Call Resolution> 75%), the average waiting time of subscribers, to receive an answer (Average Time of Answer <10 sec), agreement on the level provision of timely incident resolution services (SLA> 90%) and a number of others.
Our employees were able to plunge into work in a factory in France, after which they arrived with acquired skills in Russia. We also built ITSM processes from scratch to escalate user requests to second-level and third-level teams based in France.
A year after the start of the project, the IT-support teams of Royal Canin and Mars were merged into one Service Desk. Up to 2,000 hits from Royal Canin come in a month and about the same from Mars. In addition to operations, employees perform tasks that ensure continuous improvement in the quality of services, participate in projects to increase efficiency, and train users to work with Self-Service Portal and other automation tools.
Now several team members are participating in a large project on infrastructure standardization and ITSM processes at Royal Canin. We will tell you about this in a separate publication. Sure it will be interesting!
Project
Since 2006, the User Support Center (Mars Service Desk) in the city of Stupino has been providing IT support for Mars employees on a 24-hour, seven-day-per-week basis. In addition to their native Russian, the service staff speak English, French and German.
The Service Desk of Royal Canin in Emarg consisted of four specialists supporting 1300 French employees. They also supported local IT teams in other countries. Almost all Mars IS teams were involved in the project. To work in it, it was necessary to find people with French and English languages, as well as knowledge in the field of IT or, at least, with a great desire to build a career in this field. In addition to interaction with recruitment agencies, we have established friendly relations with several Russian language universities. The training for beginners consisted of a three-week introductory course at the Mars Service Desk and two weeks of active work on receiving user calls, followed by an internship in France.
')
The project consisted of five areas: People, Knowledge, Tools, Processes and Communications.
People
At the first stage, a team of seven analysts was formed. The first participant came from an already existing team and controlled the process of knowledge transfer: he helped train new employees, distributed resources, working with escalating user requests, and tracked overall results.
In the first three months, six more people were recruited. The selection criterion was a good knowledge of English and French, focus on results and ability to learn. In addition to the general team, each participant had personal goals aimed at developing functional and leadership competencies.
After three weeks of training and two weeks of operating work, each newcomer joined the team, while continuing to learn. Together with the operating activities, participants tried to build effective interaction with second-level teams.
In the process of project implementation, we paid great attention to identifying key individuals. For example, working groups were organized with second-tier application and infrastructure support teams. All new employees were provided with travel-friendly laptop models. And the Telecoms team helped build a tunnel between Mars and Royal Canin, which allowed them to quickly connect to local resources and users' computers.
Knowledge
With the help of interviewing existing teams in France and Russia, a list of technologies was compiled that needed to be picked up for support. The list was replenished throughout the project implementation time.
New employees joined already working teams, watched their work, listened to calls and asked questions. It was originally planned that the articles for the knowledge base will make up the members of teams of the second and third levels. However, the writing of such texts took a lot of time, and their language was too difficult for the first level employees. As a result, we asked the experts to tell about the solutions used by the business, and the members of the first-level teams wrote down and asked clarifying questions.
Documented solutions were checked by experts and entered into the knowledge base. It was decided that if the service department does not have information about a particular solution after the start of work, it will escalate the incident to the next level without trying to solve it. In the first weeks after launch, this approach helped fill out the knowledge base.
Great assistance in the operational launch of the service was provided by express internships in various departments, including in production. Analysts were able to see how IT solutions support business processes.
Instruments
In parallel with the training, a list of the necessary tools and access points that employees should have was compiled, as well as the configuration of the remote infrastructure.
Processes
We have compiled a list of IT processes that require the participation of Service Desk, as well as requests that have traditionally been performed by the first-level support service, who are not in the area of ​​responsibility of the new service department. We also agreed on the creation of a team to issue equipment and work with incidents that require physical manipulation of the equipment.
Communication
The communication was built in two directions: informing the IT hub teams about the project progress and working with users, which includes an advertising campaign and training for working remotely with Service-Desk. The advertising campaign included internal communications: presentations, videos, posters, distribution of news about the implementation stages of the Service Desk.
Mars Service Desk's work was built on ITIL practices: Incident Management, Request Fulfilment and Knowledge Management. Agreements on the level of service provision (SLA) were reached, technologies and processes included in the team’s area of ​​responsibility were identified, scenarios of interaction between teams were considered and rules were developed according to which it proceeds.
The Major Incident Management process was not overlooked, although the Service Desk team does not require significant participation in it. We identified which incidents could qualify for MIM, and which teams are responsible for the steps in this process. In particular, the responsibility of the first level service department included the diagnosis of the incident and the collection of information necessary to determine the extent of its impact on the business. The interaction with users and the involvement of the resources necessary for solving the incident has come within the competence of the second-level support team.
The team responsible for their functioning in Mars provided us with invaluable assistance in implementing ITSM processes. Existing formal and informal processes have been studied in detail, compared with their counterparts in Mars and with the description in ITIL. We developed the implementation of each solution in the ITSM tool together. It is worth noting that although we tried to reproduce as much as possible the methods of work adopted and proven in Mars, the various elements of the processes were edited in accordance with the recommendations of ITIL and taking into account the realities of business. We also decided not to hurry with the introduction of a single tool for registering complaints.
Results
The first calls started coming to Russia on December 1, 2012. For the first three months, we were able to meet the requirements for several key performance indicators: the coefficient of solving the problem during the first call (First Call Resolution> 75%), the average waiting time of subscribers, to receive an answer (Average Time of Answer <10 sec), agreement on the level provision of timely incident resolution services (SLA> 90%) and a number of others.
Our employees were able to plunge into work in a factory in France, after which they arrived with acquired skills in Russia. We also built ITSM processes from scratch to escalate user requests to second-level and third-level teams based in France.
A year after the start of the project, the IT-support teams of Royal Canin and Mars were merged into one Service Desk. Up to 2,000 hits from Royal Canin come in a month and about the same from Mars. In addition to operations, employees perform tasks that ensure continuous improvement in the quality of services, participate in projects to increase efficiency, and train users to work with Self-Service Portal and other automation tools.
Now several team members are participating in a large project on infrastructure standardization and ITSM processes at Royal Canin. We will tell you about this in a separate publication. Sure it will be interesting!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/339408/
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