The situation
An insurance organisation going through a major IT transformation targeted a 35% cost reduction over two years, much of it in the first year. The CIO aimed to redeploy or release 15% of IT support headcount over the same period.
- Senior management could not see how work was spread across the support teams.
- There was no structured way to manage demand or allocate work each day.
- Measures looked back rather than forward, and only top-priority incident SLAs were treated as important; cost of service was not measured.
- Staff took requests from outside the official workflow, and data in the transactional systems went unused.
The approach
We worked with the team managers through a 24-step programme with five milestones, one every three to four weeks:
- A catalogue of every task the teams do, and each person’s competence in it.
- Demand and capacity models built from historical and current data.
- A weekly operations dashboard combining data from several systems: time per ticket, closure rate, tickets that ran over a reasonable expectation, and work arriving outside the formal routes.
- Coaching for staff to use the dashboard every week and act on it, with a priority decision matrix and A3 problem solving.
The measured result
- Ticket time cut from 3.5 hours to 1.5 hours within six months.
- Unplanned, ad hoc work cut from 43% to 2% of team capacity.
- Capacity managed on evidence rather than perception, delivering the cost savings management expected.