If your organization is moving to a shared services model – consolidating various support capabilities into a single entity that serves the whole organization – then you’ll need a shared services manager role. But what does this entail? What will their day-to-day responsibilities be? And which personal qualities should your organization look for in potential candidates?

The difference between a service desk manager and a shared services manager

For example, could an existing manager from one of the service departments that’s now part of the shared services organization take on the new role? This could include employees from HR, facilities, finance, IT, procurement, security, and other business functions that serve the whole organization. Or does the role include such additional tasks and responsibilities that you need to find someone with additional experience, skills, and knowledge?

The answer is very much “it depends”: it could be a variety of roles in your shared services organization. For example, a senior role that spans functions – with overall responsibility for service and support across the traditional business-function areas of HR, IT, facilities, etc. For the sake of this blog, this definition is assumed.

A shared services manager must have an ongoing focus on providing improved capabilities that contribute to better business operations and outcomes.

The 7 responsibilities of a shared services manager

1. Designing and delivering the shared services vision

A shared services manager is, likely in conjunction with other shared services colleagues, responsible for designing and delivering the shared services organization’s vision. Of course, this is far from a one-time event – it requires ongoing evolution. They are also responsible for executing this vision via a long-term strategic roadmap and delivering against the associated strategies.

2. Meeting the expectations of key business stakeholders

A shared services manager needs to make sure that the services the shared services organization provides are in line with a number of key business stakeholders’ expectations. The key business stakeholders are:

• the executive board
• the business function leadership teams (i.e. Head of HR, Head of Security, Head of Legal)
• the employees that they serve

This responsibility doesn’t only involve obligations related to service level agreements (SLAs) and the associated performance targets and metrics. It also has to do with factors such as the availability of suitably skilled resources, either internally or outsourced, as best fits business needs. This also includes effective communication, although some may see this as a separate responsibility.

3. Providing effective governance

A shared services manager (and their appropriate team members) must ensure that there are suitable governance practices in place to protect the business. This ranges from ensuring legal and regulatory compliance all the way to robust business continuity planning and management.

4. Leading and managing people

Optimized processes and technologies alone don’t make for a successful shared services organization: its operations will struggle without capable and motivated people. With the right leadership and management, employees are encouraged to be the best versions of themselves – not only in terms of day-to-day productivity, but also when it comes to their personal development.

A shared services manager needs to expertly lead and manage their teams and is responsible for employee retention and recruitment. They set the tone for all teams, creating a working environment that attracts and fosters employees of the highest caliber.

5. Ensuring the effectiveness of day-to-day operations

What’s the goal when you consolidate various business function support capabilities into a shared services model? To deliver higher quality and better value services. That’s why you need someone to find the optimal blend of skilled employees, best practice processes, and enabling technologies that meets the needs of the various key business stakeholders. Importantly, for the transition to a shared services model to truly be worth it, the new day-to-day operations and outcomes have to be superior to the previous status quo.

6. Providing effective financial stewardship and demonstrating value creation

This might seem like a “boring” responsibility that should be left to the corporate finance function. But we all have a responsibility for effective financial stewardship – no matter our role or whether or not we have direct control of or responsibility for a budget.

A shared services manager does have some form of budgetary responsibility. But in modern organizations, there’s also the need to look beyond costs to see the value perspective. The cheapest option isn’t always the best and return on investment is important for all spending decisions, not only for CAPEX projects.

7. Driving continual improvement

The great thing about continual improvement in a shared services model is that any improvements will make a bigger impact thanks to consistent operations and scale. As such, especially in ensuring that they consistently meet the needs of the key business stakeholders, a shared services manager must have an ongoing focus on providing improved capabilities that contribute to better business operations and outcomes.

Importantly, this continual improvement needs to cover a range of shared services attributes – for example people’s capabilities, service levels, service offerings, and technology exploitation – and not just the employed processes. For some organizations, the shared services team plays a key role in digital transformation efforts, showing the “art of the digital possible” and the associated benefits.

The personal characteristics of a shared services manager

You can’t expect all people who fill the role to be exactly the same. Still, there are various personal characteristics that make the role a success. In many ways, these traits map directly to the seven responsibilities outlined above.

A shared services manager has:

• A focus on delivery and results. This might relate to planning and executing agreed-upon strategies, consistently achieving shared services goals, or the ability to look beyond the symptoms of operational issues to see the root causes.
• Relationship, collaboration, and communication skills. These skills are crucial – whether they’re for internal team dynamics, dealing with other business functions, or communicating with the executive board. They also need to effectively manage a variety of supplier relationships.
• Strong leadership and management capabilities. As outlined above, a shared services organization ultimately relies on its people and them doing the right things well, no matter the quality of the enabling technology.
• The ability to drive change, including influencing skills. This goes all the way from the initial “birth” of the shared services organization (if appropriate), through the ongoing need for continual improvement, to the inevitable organizational changes caused by both internal and external factors (such as regulatory or legislative changes). Importantly, this also includes the ability to facilitate people change when the current ways of working are affected.
• The desire to improve performance, services, and outcomes. In many ways, this is an “umbrella” trait atop the other personal traits – with improvement being a shared services manager’s ultimate raison d’être.

The list above is far from complete. But it’s a good starting point when looking for a suitable candidate.

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This focuses on providing better quality for lower prices. IT integrates new technologies and management models to make services easier to manage and faster to change. More and more platforms are cloud-based, process frameworks are still popular and there is more and more demand for ISO certification.

Facilities has been professionalizing services using CAFM systems for a while now. It is just as easy for end users to reserve meeting rooms as request lunches using a portal. Over the past few years, HR has taken the step towards eHRM: supporting HR services using service management software. This also uses shared services center frameworks and best practices developed specifically for the HR market.

Consumerization

It is striking that the individual departments are primarily acting on their own initiative, and each takes their own approach. HR, Facilities and IT managers play a big part in this. After all, it is they who determine strategy, which is currently too focused on their own department.

Meanwhile, the user’s expectations keep growing. Before, people could understand that it took a while to install a software package, and that it was complicated to launch a web page or implement a change in a staff management system. Nowadays end users are less and less patient, as well as less and less understanding. The trend at the root of this is consumerization.

The consumer market has made strides in recent years thanks to IT. Think for instance of the search engines that help you find anything and web shops that let you buy anything. As a consumer, you have to put increasingly little thought and effort into getting your products and services. An additional advantage is that this also makes everything cheaper.

The consequences of this trend can also be seen in the service management field. People are used to having their questions answered in a way that is easy, quick, clear and even free. Employees are coming to expect this at work as well: consumerization. People want to get things done easily, without complicated portals with forms. They want a single desk for all their questions.

Compartmentalization

It will be difficult for organizations with supporting departments using only internally focused strategies to stand up to this new commentary. The reason supporting departments are so focused on themselves is the compartmentalization that has developed since the departments’ creation. They are used to resolving the challenges they face within their own department. Each field has its own frameworks, standards and methodologies (such as ITIL, ISO, NEN) and the schooling for the fields is also separate. As a result, the knowledge platforms, trade shows and magazines are all focused on one specific field: HR, Facilities or IT.

This compartmentalization is anchored in the field and has helped it come a long way. It is obvious that the situation described above cannot be easily changed. It is up to HR, Facilities and IT managers to develop a new strategy that is needed to address the consumerization among their customers in the future.

The solution is enterprise service management: jointly organizing services and improving them in the places where the service provision truly overlaps.

Implement Enterprise Service Management

Enterprise service management (ESM) is a new strategic trend that is stimulated by the consumerization trend. Supporting departments join forces and look for ways to organize their services for their customers – together.

This results in higher quality services for customers while also lowering costs. In doing this, it is important to recognize each department’s expertise and at the same time look for the areas where services overlap and can be improved. This has a synergetic effect: expertise is better shared.

In projects where steps are made toward a shared services center, collaboration is primarily sought out in the areas of tools, organization and process management. The ESM growth model was developed to help achieve shared services. This growth model comprises four phases that can be seen as maturity phases within ESM. The order of these steps results in a logical, incremental change process with each phase focusing on tools, organization or process management.

Each next phase naturally brings the services of the various departments closer together, makes the departments more mature and helps actualize both improved quality and lower costs.

Phase 0: Nothing Shared

Each department uses its own tools to support their processes. This can be anything from sticky notes to using a professional service management tool. The processes between departments are not coordinated and vary greatly in terms of maturity. The employees are focused on their own department. with little cross-breeding – or even awareness of each others’s processes.

This phase’s biggest challenge is sharing the information streams with other departments when necessary. Think for instance of employee changes for which the different departments must perform activities, while each department uses its own service management tools.

Phase 1: Shared Tool

A shared service management tool is used to improve the information stream. This also results in considerable savings when it comes to license costs and management. The various departments still have their own methods based on their own culture.

Regardless, agreements must be made about the terminology used and how the tool is set up. The first signs of project-based collaboration appear. A tip: have the information management department take the lead in this project. This helps avoid big discussions and prevents IT from playing too dominant a role.

During the management phase, it makes sense that information management takes on the functional management. After all, HR, Facilities and IT are all end users of the service management tool. Not much has changed for the end user. They still deal with three parties to support their work: HR, Facilities and IT.

Phase 2: Shared Service Desk

From now on, the end user can take all questions and requests to a single digital and/or physical desk. With the exception of agreements about call registration and routing, each department still works according to its own methods. The collaboration does become more intensive, because operators from different departments start collaborating and improving knowledge sharing at the shared service desk.

This leads to a considerable improvement in quality for the end user, as well as reduced costs resulting from sharing resources at the service desk. A tip: promote this shared service desk using a slogan and a “face” to prevent end users from continuing to use the old channels.

It is primarily the front end that improves: the user sees an improvement, but still experiences different levels of service quality. This is caused by the individual departments maintaining their own work processes. Think for instance of inconsistent communication about status updates and large differences in duration for similar calls.

Phase 3: Shared Processes

The processes and procedures that require the departments to work together, or feature a considerable overlap in activities, are designed in collaboration. Specialized knowledge of the activities to be performed is not necessary to organize good process management.

Processing calls and implementing employee changes are the most obvious actions to start with. However, other options include processing reservations and performing operational tasks.

After implementing these new shared processes, the process management must also be centrally sourced. Depending on the organization, this could be sourced with a separate service management team. The various departments’ management also has an important role to play. It is they who must understand the importance of this phase and of shared processes, and not only communicate this importance, but also recognize the authority of the process managers.

The right ambition

Recent research conducted among 200 organizations has revealed that many organizations have already taken steps toward phases 1 and 2. However, not many organizations have started working on phase 3.

A likely explanation is that the savings diminish and become increasingly less visible as you progress through the growth model. While IT managers continue to focus only on cutting costs, organizations will not be able to progress past phase 2. Optimal results can only be achieved when managers focus not only on savings, but also service quality, regardless of the phase. To continue meeting business demands, it is essential to look beyond costs. The quality of services must also increase.

To make this happen, the ambition must always be the right one. Only then can you continue to meet increasing business demand by combining the strengths of the supporting departments – and saving money in the process. Not the other way around.

Improving Service Quality

The consumerization trend has the business asking for more and more against lower costs. They want to do things faster and more easily, while having to think less and receiving consistent service. This is not something that every supporting department can achieve by themselves.

This is why it’s down to the manager to adjust the strategy accordingly and consciously choose to collaborate with other supporting departments to improve the quality of services.

The Solution

Enterprise service management offers the solution. To implement ESM, strengths must be combined incrementally in terms of tools, service desk and processes, while each department maintains its own expertise.

The goal is to reach shared services with higher quality, with the added benefit of considerably lower costs. This helps you continue to meet end users’ expectations in the future.

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Cooperation has long been a hallmark of successful organizations. But today’s digital world demands that organizations be innovative, relevant, responsive, work holistically, and solve problems quickly. Cooperation isn’t enough. What’s really needed is collaboration.

What’s the difference between cooperation and collaboration?

Departments within an organization cooperate when they agree to work together to achieve a goal or outcome. But there’s a catch. When departments cooperate, they’re typically saying “I’ll do my part and you do yours.”

Collaboration goes much deeper than just working together. Collaboration means sharing – not only goals and work, but also sharing the risk and reward.

But for some organizations, the thought of collaboration brings fear.

Why are departments afraid of collaboration?

Collaboration helps organizations make the most out of their resources. It enables them to use the right people, on the right tasks, to deliver the right outcomes – thereby improving efficiency, creating stronger work relationships, improving problem-solving capabilities, and driving innovation.

So why are some organizations afraid of collaboration?

This Harvard Business Review article provides some insight into why some organizations fear collaboration. With collaboration comes:

• Loss of group identity: identity provides groups with a centre of gravity and meaning within an organization.
• Loss of legitimacy: a group’s legitimacy develops when that group is perceived by others as fitting, acceptable, and valuable within the organization.
• Loss of control: groups feel that they must be able to act autonomously to effect meaningful change.

Imagine how collaboration might prompt these fears. Perhaps the facilities department becomes concerned over a perceived loss of control over its work orders. Or the IT service desk may feel that it isn’t qualified to be an enterprise-level service desk.

The concerns listed above overlap in one important aspect: a sense of territorial ownership. Owning territory provides a way for groups to differentiate themselves, establish value, and have the decision rights needed to do their work.

Additionally, collaboration represents a significant departure from business as usual. Traditionally, organizations reward and compensate individuals based upon achievement of defined individual goals. But in many cases, this results in an unintended consequence – individuals and departments become focused on achieving individual goals at the expense of broader organizational goals. So rather than collaborate, departments and individuals tend to dig in.

Answer the WIIFMs

How can leaders help their organizations overcome this fear of collaboration?
Before answering the “why collaborate?” question, you have to answer the WIIFMs – “what’s in it for me?” – for both the departments and the individuals in question.

To help departments become collaborative, this Harvard Business Review article suggests that leaders:

• Reinforce the group’s identity by publicly acknowledging the critical roles that a group has always played in areas fundamental to its identity.
• Reaffirm the group’s legitimacy by publicly acknowledging the group’s importance and its differentiated value in the company.
• Reassert control by identifying the major areas in which the group has autonomy and decision rights, by identifying the processes, decisions, and other topics the group has responsibility. Then consider the processes, decisions, and other topics that require shared or ambiguous control, and how these map into the department’s identified areas of responsibility. Where there are overlaps, one approach to address it is to find other areas in which the group’s control and autonomy can be increased (even if outside of the target initiative) in which you can increase the group’s control and autonomy.

From an Enterprise Service Management (ESM) perspective, remind the IT service desk how it excels at its core mission: resolving issues and helping its customers get their work done. Likewise, assure the facilities department that they’re the acknowledged experts in designing and establishing a physical work environment that enables productive work.

When it comes to people, you might have to tailor your approach depending on the individual in question. This recent Fast Company article lists a few ways to help individuals that struggle with being collaborative:

• List the benefits: help individuals visualize the benefits of collaboration. Have individuals make a list of all the benefits that result from collaboration, such as mutually beneficial relationships and sharing resources. Then make a list of the benefits of remaining closed. Ask which list makes them feel more connected and empowered, and which list makes them feel limited and fearful.
• Identify strengths and weaknesses: have individuals identify their own strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of their colleagues. This will help individuals recognize that doing everything themselves is not sustainable and identify areas for potential collaboration that would be mutually beneficial.
• Don’t forget the mission: one of the biggest reasons why organizations slip back into competition is that they become disconnected from the organization’s mission and their deeper individual values. When an individual reconnects with their “why” – why they joined the company, for example – it becomes easier to focus on that greater purpose, rather than be distracted by smaller battles that are irrelevant.

What’s collaboration got to do with ESM?

Effective Enterprise Service Management both relies on and helps reinforce and drive collaboration. ESM helps organizations focus on the end-to-end delivery and support of value and outcomes of the organization. Done well, ESM underpins the “win-win” of good collaboration.

Not only does the organization reap the benefits of collaboration, but individuals and departments recognize how they contribute to that success by working effectively with others. Good ESM also paves the way for workflow automation, business process reliability and consistency, and end-to-end performance measurability.

Collaboration goes much deeper than just working together. Collaboration means sharing services – not only goals and work, but also sharing the risk and reward.

Embrace collaboration, not cooperation

Organizations often mistakenly concentrate on cooperation, not collaboration. They simply focus on tool adoption or only implementing service management practices within individual departments – settling for cooperation.

To avoid this, use these mapping approaches to identify collaboration needs and opportunities:

• Customer journey maps: customer journey maps illustrate how individual customers experience your organization. They identify each interaction between the customer and the organization, showing which departments are involved at each stage – and demonstrating potential areas for collaboration.
• Value stream maps: a value stream map depicts how information and work flow through an organization. Most value streams within an organization cross departmental boundaries, again illustrating the need for collaboration.
• Employee journey maps: an employee journey map is like a customer journey map, but it looks at the experience with the organization from the perspective of the employee.

Any of these mapping approaches will provide valuable guidance and drive good collaboration.

5 things you must do to drive effective collaboration

So, if you want to drive effective collaboration across departments, where do you start? Take a look at these five tips:

1. Be inclusive: effective collaboration depends upon involving each department that will be contributing to the initiative. Good collaboration is a team sport!
2. Act with a sense of urgency: taking a focused, proactive approach drives engagement and results.
3. Identify and implement quick wins: get off to a good start with a few quick wins using the outcomes from mapping exercises (described above) as guidance.
4. Iterate: don’t try to do everything at once – instead, work in small increments.
5. Celebrate every success: reinforce the benefits of collaboration by celebrating success.

Learn more about Enterprise Service Management?

Want to learn more about best practices for collaboration in the meantime? Download our ESM e-book and begin your organization’s journey towards successful ESM.

The post How to improve collaboration between departments appeared first on MCG - EN.

But there’s more you can do to improve your organization’s back-office business functions. One opportunity is changing your organizational structure to create a single support provider for employees. It’s the creation of a shared services organization based on a shared services model.

The shared services model explained

If you’re as old as I am, you’ll remember the classic centralization versus decentralization debate – is it better to have one centralized, organization-wide IT department or to have separate, decentralized IT teams within each individual department (HR having its own IT team, for example)? Eventually, centralization emerged as the best way to deliver high-quality services and support at the best possible cost.

The shared services model is a further extension of the centralized model – this time, consolidating various business function support capabilities into a single organization-wide support entity. This could include HR (and payroll), facilities, finance, IT, legal services, governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) teams, procurement, security, and other business function support capabilities that serve the whole organization. A shared services organization has the following benefits:

• Easier service accessibility, greater service consistency, and a better employee experience
• Operational efficiencies and associated cost reductions
• Improved knowledge sharing, management, and exploitation
• Better operational insight into performance and improvement opportunities

Most importantly, shared services allow your organization to build its service and support capabilities around employee wants and needs – and not those of the individual service providers as has been the case historically. This simplification of support benefits both employee productivity and business outcomes.

Shared services allow your organization to build its service and support capabilities around employee wants and needs – and not those of individual service providers.

Not all shared services organizations are the same

As with many things in life, there’s no “one-size-fits-all” shared services model. Different organizations have different wants, needs, and capabilities that influence how they implement a shared services model.

For example, some organizations simply want their various business functions to be more closely aligned. As a result, this type of model will create a loose coupling that improves cross-departmental collaboration. Imagine your HR, facilities, and IT departments working together, rather than in siloes, for the collective good of the employees they all serve.

At the other end of the spectrum is the “consolidated” model where there’s one of everything. In other words, it’s a single organization that reports into a single leadership team, with a single service desk staffed by first-line personnel who can field calls across business function lines. There’s also a single way of dealing with employee requests for help, information, service, and change. It makes life so much easier for employees (as there’s a single point of support), offers economies of scale to organizations, and provides support staff with a greater variety of work and development opportunities.

How to implement a shared services model

Most organizations will take a phased approach to introducing a shared services model. And, in the same way that there’s no “one-size-fits-all” model, there are also different ways to phase the journey to such a model. The most common method is to take an organizational-structure-based approach to change, which includes the following three phases:

1. Business functions start with their separate service and support groups

Each group uses their own tools and processes – with their own telephone number and self-service portal – and they report to their respective departments. Employees have to know which business function to contact for their requests.

2. The co-location of service and support groups

Each business function service and support group still reports to their respective department, but all groups are now co-located in a single service and support centre. Depending on the maturity of the co-located operations, it might already be possible to share workloads across the individual groups to cater to the peaks and troughs that are commonplace in business support.

3. The introduction of a shared services organization

The “walls” between the individual service and support groups are removed. A single shared services organization provides all-encompassing, company-wide employee support. Practices and technologies are agreed upon at an organizational level.

Organizing for a shared services model

As well as processes and technology, there are several other areas that need to be unified when moving to a shared services model. These include:

Leadership

The introduction of a shared services organization replaces the various business function leadership teams with a single leadership structure: the shared services manager. The shared services organization reports to this new leadership team but probably still has dotted line relationships into the original business functions such as HR. After all, the shared service organization is providing a service on behalf of the original business functions – meaning that both direction and performance reporting are needed as a minimum.

Governance

The shared services model requires a common approach to governance. For example, in setting organization-wide objectives and targets (see the performance management bullet below), and in ensuring that everyone agrees on and effectively communicates about roles and responsibilities.

People management

This touches on performance management but also, importantly, it covers the need for a common and effective people recruitment and development model. This is important on two levels. First, service and support staff are no longer limited to handling one single business function area – instead, they deal with employee requests across multiple areas. Second, the shared services organization needs to function more effectively than the individual groups it replaces – so its employees’ capabilities will play a large role in ensuring that this happens.

Performance management

The common approach to performance measurement and management applies on many levels. From governance, through people management, to the identification of improvement opportunities. Plus, of course, it also applies to service performance. Where, if a service level agreement (SLA)-based approach is taken, it will require a consistent, organization-wide, approach, and targets that are now agreed upon by two distinct parties. Not only the original business customers and stakeholders, but also the business functions – such as HR, facilities, and IT – that now have a dotted line into the shared services organization.

Ongoing improvement

Whereas individual business functions identify and address improvement opportunities in isolation, a shared services organization can achieve far more. This is due to its larger scale, the use of a single best-practice approach to continuous improvement, and the removal of duplication of effort. For example, initiatives to increase support staff engagement levels or employee experience.

More about shared services

I hope this blog has given you a good insight into how adopting a shared services model can magnify the benefits of Enterprise Service Management for your organization. If you have any questions or thoughts, please let me know in the comment section below.

The post A shared services model – the next evolution of ESM appeared first on MCG - EN.

Modern organizations are becoming increasingly interconnected – with partners, with vendors, and even within the organization itself. They recognize that in order to improve their responsiveness to customers and eliminate internal inefficiencies, they must work in a collaborative, holistic way.

What is a single point of contact (SPOC)?

Such an approach can have a transformative effect on how work flows through the organization itself – drastically increasing productivity and the overall employee experience. That’s why organizations are turning to Enterprise Service Management (ESM).

In short, ESM is the application of IT service management (ITSM) practices and tools across the organization. But it’s not enough to simply implement ESM – you also need to make sure it’s as user-friendly as possible. That’s where having a single point of contact (SPOC) comes in.

SPOC is an abbreviation of “single point of contact”. A single point of contact is exactly that – a single point of contact. Employees shouldn’t have to know ‘exactly’ what they need, much less who specifically to contact about that need. Employees only need to know how to engage the single point of contact. Done well, a SPOC assures your employee that their question or issue will be properly addressed by the appropriate colleague.

From an IT perspective, the SPOC is typically the IT Service Desk. But what about from the enterprise perspective?

The enterprise SPOC is not your father’s service desk

An enterprise SPOC takes an organization-wide approach to providing answers and support to its employees. It consolidates the functionality of the various departmental service centers under a single entity, eliminating the confusion and potential inefficiencies that result from having multiple service centers within an organization.

So where should the SPOC be located?

The enterprise SPOC must have a holistic view of the organization — that’s a given. Departments such as HR, Facilities, IT, Finance, and others do have that enterprise perspective, as each department is involved with all other parts of the organization. Any department with an enterprise perspective is a candidate for hosting the SPOC.

Should the IT service desk become the SPOC? An IT service desk typically has the necessary infrastructure for becoming an enterprise SPOC. IT service desks have multiple telephone lines, chat capabilities, and perhaps even knowledge bases and self-service portals. Plus, the IT service desk has experience as a SPOC.

But the enterprise SPOC is less about technology, and more about employee experience – ensuring that employees have positive experiences in their daily work interactions.

While most IT service desks have good technical acumen and soft skills, a frequent complaint is that IT service desks lack a good understanding of the business, which sometimes inhibits the effectiveness of the interactions with the service desk. On the other hand, there are a fair number of technology issues that the enterprise SPOC will have to deal with.

So, there is no definitive, “one size fits all” answer for where to locate the enterprise SPOC. Factors to consider include emotional intelligence, technical acumen, and organizational savvy.

Employees shouldn’t have to know ‘exactly’ what they need, much less who specifically to contact about that need. Employees only need to know how to engage the single point of contact.

Is an enterprise SPOC right for my organization?

The complexities resulting from an ever-increasing interconnected business, such as the pace of technology adoption, business models shifting to ecosystems rather than direct supply chains, and ever-evolving organizational structures, don’t have to impact employees. An effective enterprise SPOC can help employees avoid such complexity in their daily work. So, what are some potential single point of contact benefits, and which types of organizations would benefit from a SPOC?

Organizations that want to drive good employee experience

Many organizations are investing in employee experience. Studies have shown that happy employees make for happy customers, because engaged employees provide better customer service. A SPOC helps ensure that employees can use the tools and services provided by the organization to do their jobs as effectively as possible.

Find out how a shared services model allows your organization to build its service and support capabilities around employee wants and needs

Organizations that have a collaborative culture

A SPOC exemplifies a culture of working as “one company.” Success of the enterprise SPOC relies on having an organization that exhibits a culture of teamwork and trust, acting and working as one company. Collaboration is more than just “working together;” it means sharing goals, work, risks, and rewards, and enables organizations to maximize effectiveness.

Organizations that want to improve their value streams

A SPOC raises the focus on delivering effective enterprise value streams. Onboarding new employees is a value stream found within every organization. But for most organizations, this means that someone (often the hiring manager) must contact or coordinate the activities of each department involved in the process. The HR department sets up the new employee on payroll and benefit systems.

The facilities department sets up the office or cubicle where the new employee will work. IT establishes access to the systems and tools that the new employee will need to do their job. Now imagine having a SPOC with the capability of driving such value streams using an enterprise approach enabled by ESM.

7 steps for starting your SPOC

Ready to start your organization’s SPOC? Here are seven simple steps for getting off to the right start.

1. Identify your organizational service providers

Which departments provide services and support to others within the organization? Invite a representative from those departments to a brainstorming session.

2. Ask each provider to discuss their “top 3” activities or requests

What is the department dealing with on a regular and frequent basis? Have each service provider write their “top 3” on sticky notes or a whiteboard and briefly discuss what each activity entails. These frequent requests represent some quick – and impactful – wins.

3. Identify those activities and requests that engage other service providers

Where are dependencies between providers? Is there work duplicated between providers? Identify the top three to five activities and requests that involve more than one service provider so they can be streamlined going forward.

4. Document an employee journey map for each of these activities and requests

An employee journey map is the same thing as a customer journey map – except that it’s the journey from the employee perspective. What are the interactions between the employee and each service provider? Does the employee have to visit a service provider more than once during a particular request? Translate these journey maps to organizational value streams.

Why? First, you can identify and remove the waste and friction from the work being done. Secondly, you’ll identify how the involved providers collaborate. And lastly, you’ll capture the current state of how it’s working today.

5. Streamline each value stream and set performance targets

How long does it take to resolve the employee’s issue or request? Are there improvements that should be made? How will these improvements improve the employee journey?

6. Identify and implement improvements

Agree on which service provider will act as the SPOC. Implement those improved value streams.

7. Promote the new capabilities of the SPOC

Develop and execute a marketing and communication plan to publicize the new SPOC and its capabilities. Measure the performance of the improved value streams and begin continual improvement.

Setting up a single point of contact can be transformative for your organization, improving productivity and efficiency, and helping your organization work as “one company.” There will be some effort involved, and it may seem complex, but don’t become discouraged. Taking an iterative and holistic approach will revolutionize your organization, transforming your employee experience in the process.

In Doug’s next blog, he’ll discuss why Enterprise Service Management needs collaboration and not just cooperation – and what the difference between the two is.

Want to learn more about a single point of contact and how your service departments can join forces in the meantime? Download our ESM e-book and start benefiting from working together.

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