In this entry, I will be adding to my portfolio of work with the Critical Artifacts Initiative: SMO. This will be following the STAR structure.

Synopsis

 

Situation

I was onboarded a few months after the new Director of the newly formed Service Management Office (SMO). She was in the process of transforming the organization from a ‘back-office’ function to a leadership stance within the enterprise and the account teams. This created a need for stand-alone sales and solutions documentation specific to the new service offering.

Task

Due to the fact service management was embed in other service offerings and not positioned the way the Director has envisioned the newly formed organization, for all intents and purposes, this was creating a new service offering from scratch. A minimum viable product (MVP) of critical artifacts needed to be created as quickly as possible and stored within a repository for immediate use by the sales and solutions organization. This was in order to meet the needs of the current and future pipelines to generate additional revenue for the higher level of service the SMO would start delivering.

Action

Referring to the existing embed information in documentation and understanding the Director’s vision of the organization, I was to author seven (7) documents, to support the already created costing plan. This would be detailing the SMO’s capabilities and functions as a new service offering. Solution Architects would be consuming this documentation and utilizing it as the starting point for the customer-specific contracts.

Collaborating with the Senior Solution Architect, the service offering itself needed to be structured in a very specific way to meet the guidelines previously laid out. For the SMO, this ended up being:

 

• two (2) mandatory services,
• four (4) components (each service having 2 components),
• three (3) elements (1 component having 1 element and the other component having 2 elements), and
• five (5) objects (the components and its respective elements being applied to these 5 objects.

If this seems complicated to you, even if I didn’t censor the details, it was. It was a paradigm shift on how we were positioning Service Management. However, once the writing began, it started to fall into place nicely and positioned Service Management as it needed to be.

Results

Within the agreed upon timeframe and after multiple redlines and revisions, seven (7) artifacts detailing and describing the following were created and stored.

• statement of work (SOW);
• roles & responsibilities;
• deliverables (including reporting);
• parameters, boundaries, and limitations;
• internal guides for both how to solution and an elaboration of costs; and
• a client facing presentation describing the service offering and its value proposition on solving particular pain points.

In addition to those documents, major updates to the costing plan were implemented as well.

This service offering, in conjunction with the Director’s and the entire organization’s OCM (organization change management) effort, the SMO has been established as a leader within each account and in the internal, enterprise organization itself. Moving forward, the SMO was required on all out-sourcing solutions and could be offered as a stand-alone service. Vast improvements have been made to multiple ITIL processes that our followed by service delivery teams, both internal and external, which began with this effort.

The day I am writing this entry, two (2) years have passed since this was completed. Since then, due to the SMO’s success, the objects within the service offering have expanded to a total of eight (8).

In my book, this was quite the success!

 

Thank you for your time,