Prevailing Service Management

Recently I was lucky enough to be part of a team who won the 2014 Suncorp Innovation Day. This event was heavily based on the concept known as a Fedex Day (known variants include Ship It Day or Hackathon ). What is Fedex Day? Well you'll be surprised to know that it did not originate from Fedex , one of the world's largest express transportation companies. Altassian , an Australian software company are noted as the creators of the concept which has been adopted by organisations across the globe. Rob Van Lanen best sums up Fedex Day as "a 24-hour event in which employees deliver innovation to the company they work for. It is called FedEx Day, because you have to deliver overnight, like the parcel delivery company. A FedEx Day is a fixed time box in which people are not disturbed for regular work. Within this time box, employees have total autonomy over the project they are enthusiastic about. They decide for themselves what they will be working on, who they are going t...

Organisations that practise concepts like IT service management, Agile, Lean, etc may from time to time commission process maturity assessments. These assessments, usually conducted by third parties, can provide a fresh perspective on the health and maturity of your service provision. While there are various views in the IT industry on the effectiveness of these assessments, the end result in most cases, is a report that outlines the strengths and weaknesses of your service delivery with a series of recommendations. Once these recommendations are handed down, the service provider usually selects and prioritises the recommendations for action. It is at this point, I'd suggest considering: Moments of Truth, and  Moments of Leadership. Moments of Truth  was a book written by the then President of  Scandinavian  Airlines,  Jan Carlzon . Published in 1987, Jan's book outlines his position (with examples) that customers will remain loyal if they are tre...