In our last post, we started to give an idea of what Service Delivery is (as well as quite rightly bigging the role up and sending a big shout out to Service Delivery professionals everywhere) but now we need to start understanding exactly what Service Delivery is...DISCLAIMER - stick with me a little in this post, we need to look at the past before we get into good stuff about where service delivery is at now, and what the future looks like!
Now, there's more than one way to skin a ninja (nervous gulp) so we're going to explore the idea of Service Delivery by looking at it a few different ways and over a few different blog posts. We'll start here, looking at the traditional Service Delivery roles (the plural is deliberate), where you might find them and the variances between them. We'll touch a little on how these roles have evolved and in some cases combined too, but not too much as that's pencilled in for a future article and as we've only just launched the Service Delivery Ninja Blog, we kinda need to ensure we pace ourselves and don't run out of things to say too soon!!
So, traditionally service delivery is fairly Ronseal (if your reading this and have no idea what I mean by Ronseal - please google, "Ronseal advert" before going further). The role was and still is in many organisations, all about ensuring a service is delivered correctly, normally an outsourced or third party contracted service where the role is to ensure that whichever third party is delivering the paid for service is doing so as per the agreed contract, SLAs, quality metrics and service schedules which the service delivery manager will know the full and fine details of, a kind of third party performance manager if you like.
Traditionally, Service Delivery does exactly what it says on the tin - ensuring the delivery of services.
Now there are a plethora of variances you will encounter here, mostly the differing role titles that do exactly what I've outlined above e.g. Outsourced Services Manager, Third Party Performance Manager etc etc etc - but before we get into these, let me call out one large variance you will definitely find when looking at Service Delivery in the traditional sense, the difference between Operational Service Delivery and Technical Service Delivery.
Traditional View - Operational Service Delivery
Operational Service Delivery is probably the closest to the outsourced services definition above. Traditionally service delivery here is about making sure an outsourced operation provided by a contracted third party e.g. an outsourced contact centre, outsourced back office or outsourced logistics and fulfilment service is delivered as per the terms and metrics specified in the service agreement, contract or schedule agreed by your organisation and the third party. Now, in some very large organisations with sub company structures or owned subsidiaries it is possible to find a Service Delivery Manager overseeing an "outsourced" service which is owned by the same company for example, your a service delivery manager responsible for the services provided via the contract between your company and a software development company - but the software company is 100% owned by your company and only provides software for your company.
Still with me?
It's not an uncommon set up where companies are owned by a parent Group or where larger businesses want to divest their scale or financial footprint, the reason for included is purely because I'm sure the set up will resonate with some reading this. Now what about Technical Service Delivery.
Traditional View - Technical Service Delivery
Ok, so same principles of managing an outsourced service but this time we're gonna flex what we mean by "outsourced" as we're not necessarily talking about an outsourced operation now we're talking about technical services which are relied upon for your end to end to function, a simple example being where you've outsourced the payment services (here I mean the ability for your customers to pay online) to a third party payment platform provider. Your Service Delivery manager is responsible for ensuring the third party's availability, speed of service etc is as per the contract. Now I know there will be some technical colleagues shaking the screen here at my very simplistic example, there are I know far more complex examples and when we get into digital services, availability, speed, connectivity etc are all real-time monitored services.
With that said, lets delve into another variance, typically only found in the technical space. In large organisations with significant technology divisions such services are overseen by technical monitoring teams along with multiple other third party connections and services, made much easier here than in the operational sense due to the digital and real-time nature of available metrics, so do you need a service delivery manager for each third party? well, not really.
What large organisations do need however, are individuals to be responsible for the service provided by their technology divisions (and here we find our one example of a service delivery area/ team/ manager), we also need someone to be responsible for the "operational side" of our technical division right, the tech support helpline or internal helpdesk for example - outsourced or insourced, its an operation that will have metrics and service standards to adhere to (referring you back to the operational service delivery view above).
So Service Delivery is not as straightforward as we might think - hence the very first blog post on this site trying to articulate just why its so hard to explain or describe what we as service delivery professionals do!!
Whilst we've touched on some variances between technical and operational service delivery there are absolutely some things in common. Firstly, the most obvious similarity is that regardless of whether you work in the technical or operational space, if something goes wrong with a service you are responsible for overseeing, be it a downward trending SLA, a degradation in connectivity, whatever, its YOU people will come to for answers, its YOU who will be expected to resolve the issue, its YOU that EEEEVVVVEEEERRRRYYYYOOOONNNNEEEE is looking at.
Secondly good service delivery managers will undoubtedly know where the service they are responsible for sits in the grand scheme of things, the end to end, what relies on the service they manage and what happens if there's an issue, the risks around the service, the people involved, the processes - irrespective of whether we are talking technology or operations, totally outsourced or "internally" outsourced. Its these similarities which takes me to a more modern view of Service Delivery and I mentioned at the top of this article that we would touch on how these traditional role views have merged.
More Modern View - Enterprise Service Delivery (or End to End Service Delivery if you like)
Lets extract some of the points from the above two traditional role views;
Central point of contact for the service
Responsible for solving issues with the service
Knows the detail of the service
Understands the dependencies on the service and where it fits into the end to end of the organisation
Therefore aware of the risks posed to the organisation BY the service failing and the risks To the service that could prevent consistent smooth operation.
Now, in the above bullets, we've not touched on any difference between technical or operational service delivery, we've focused only on the end to end. What is to the left and to the right of the service, how the service fits into the overall organisations offering and what the risks are to that.
This is where we find what I believe is a more modern view of service delivery and a closer description of the role we now find when looking at job descriptions labelled "Service Delivery". Modern Service Delivery has, in my opinion, been driven by the digital evolution, in turn driven by consumer behaviour and demand - the "Amazon Prime Effect" I call it - I can buy what I want/ need, it is delivered next day and I don't need to leave the sofa and actually if it doesn't arrive next day, I'm pretty peeved because that's the expectation that we, as consumers have today, we're no longer used to waiting, imagine todays teenagers being given a dial up internet connection, adults are not far off that reaction if we don't see the DPD or Amazon van arriving 24 hours post checkout.
In a world which is now 24//7, 365 and real-time, consumers just won't accept slow service anymore, technology and operational services have had to adapt to meet this demand, therefore so too have the roles which ensure their delivery.
Technology built to handle massive data updates, work sequentially and in a logical order like batch processing can't deal with this real time demand - if you've ever watched a batch processing its a bit like watching the little animation for dial up internet referenced above, if you are of a maturity where you can remember that! Operations haven't escaped this demand either by the way, unhappy customers want to talk to someone now, they don't want to wait, that online form that drops to a back office case handler - the customer doesn't care, its online so it should be instant or at least sub 24 hours right, email enquiries - an answer is expected in minutes not days - I could go on. The point here is that as organisations change to be able to meet this expectation, digitising technologies, moving from batch to microservice, from manual data entry input to robotic automation, paper and post to photo and email etc the ONLY way to ensure you are meeting this expectation is to look a the service holistically, end to end, from customer request to fulfilment/closure and every step in between.
So do we put a service delivery manager on each group of technical services and another few on each outsourced operational element? Course not, what has happened is an amalgamation of the traditional technical and operational service delivery roles to create what I call "multilingual service delivery role" or as I put it earlier, Enterprise Service Delivery.
Multilingual Service Delivery
Service delivery professionals are a little bit special in that they can speak at least 4 languages and they can do it in a unique way too;
Customer (Fluent) - understanding customer expectation and impact
Technology (Working Proficiency) - not necessarily a full blown software or network engineer but knows enough to understand how it works, the steps and the flow of data in the process.
Operation (Working Proficiency) - again, not necessarily an ops manager (though many SDMs come from this background) but knows how an operation, workflow and resourcing model works.
Risk (Native Speaker) - Knows what the impact can be if any component part of the end to end fails, preventing delivery to the customer, even able to predict it based on external or surrounding factors.
Service Delivery professionals have to speak many different languages, customer, technology, operations and risk predominantly. This ability leads to service delivery colleagues often being called upon to translate and simplify (usually when something has or is about to go wrong) answering questions such as "so what does that mean" or "can you help me understand the impact" - this is one of the unique abilities common across service delivery professionals.
Now there's one very important point to draw out about the ability to speak these languages and its that Service Delivery professionals are able to do two very unique things;
Speak all four simultaneously - as an example they can outline a service issue, problem or risk by giving an overview of the customer impact, the technical cause, the operational workaround proposed and the risks involved throughout. (N.B. I note issues are not always technical requiring an operational solution before I significantly offend my technology readers, operational problems frequently require technical solutions also)
They can make the explanation simple or they can dial up or down the complexity in any of the areas depending upon who they need to engage with. As examples, a good SDM can explain in an issue quickly and in simple terms to a CEO but can then equally dig into the raw technical or operational detail with relevant parties to find the solution (before explaining it in simple terms to the colleagues facing the angry customers on the phone who are unhappy about their order confirmation crashing on the screen!!)
So consumer demand and digitisation have given birth to a new form of Service Delivery (the traditional roles do still exist by the way) but as businesses grow, become more 24/7 and real-time and where mistakes and service issues are only one click away from trending on social media for all the world to see a more holistic, diverse and multilingual role is required to ensure continuity of service. How that role is deployed to meet this need we'll explore in our next post where we look at service delivery through a "model" lens - then we'll start dissecting a service delivery professional to see what makes them so unique :)
Enjoy the rest of the week and have a great weekend when you get to it - I hope you are not on call (notes that most SDMs are ALWAYS on call)
The Service Delivery Ninja
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