Scenario Brewster's Is a Toy Factory That Has Been in Business

Scenario Brewster's is a toy factory that has been in business for 30 years. The company started with a small family run shop and has grown consistently over the years. They are now supplying toy stores nationwide and are considered to be the primary supplier of children's collectable novelty erasers. Brewster's IT department is relatively small (currently 15 staff) but efficient. They have recently employed an IT Manager in an attempt to improve the management of the infrastructure, as well as more effective use of resources and identification of areas for improvement. The Brewster's management teams do not have a lot of IT knowledge. The newly appointed IT Manager is very ITIL focused and wants to implement as many ITSM processes as is appropriate there are currently no formal processes in place. On starting with the company the IT Manager completed an internal assessment of the IT infrastructure - including staff skills analysis, and collated the results from customer satisfaction surveys completed over the last 5 years. The main areas of concern are as follows: Responses from customer satisfaction survey: Overall a consistent satisfaction level. However, responses completed during the past 12 months show an increase in customers who were unsatisfied with call waiting times when contacting the service desk for help with online orders and requests for information. Customers added the following additional comments: "Never get to speak to the same person twice when dealing with an Incident number, had to call several times to receive follow up on progress" "Some of the Service Desk staff seem under qualified to deal with my questions about new applications/incidents/service requests" Results from Staff Skills Analysis: Staff, in general, have a good knowledge of IT systems and a basic understanding of the business processes and objectives. However, staff are not well informed of upcoming releases of new or changed services and not given adequate information to relay to the customers. Staff added the following additional comments: "Communication between Service Operation departments has become inefficient - there are meetings for the sake of meetings, but the important information we need to know to do our day to day jobs is lacking" "I still don't know what half of the people do, that work in the IT department!" Results from General IT Infrastructure assessment: Lack of event monitoring and planning Lack of input from Operational Support departments into Service Design Lack of skill and information sharing across the Operational Support teams with regards to Incident, Problem, Workarounds and Known Error data. Little to no proactive activities being carried out. Refer to Scenario Which of the following options would be the most effective option to address the issues identified from the Staff Skills Analysis?

A) Organize a meeting with the managers of each IT department and form a Communication Plan. This plan will include all agreed methods, reasons and a list of personnel to be included for communications within the Operation departments. This plan will then be distributed to all staff, with a memo that will include; A photograph of each IT staff member with job title. Brief Job Description and explanation of their day to day activities. In addition, make a proposal to the Business that a Release and Deployment Manager is needed, this role will not only take on the responsibility of implementing a formal Release and Deployment process but will, manage the build, test and deployment departments and will also ensure that there is a consistent communication route to the service desk on upcoming releases and organizing training/knowledge updates and consultation with service desk staff on new or changed services.
B) A photograph of each IT staff member with job title Brief Job Description and explanation of their day to day activities In addition, ask for the service desk to be sent copies of the release schedule so they are informed of upcoming releases.
C) Recommend to the Business that a new staff training program needs to be implemented that will include one service desk member per week shadowing a member of staff in each of the Business Process areas to learn how they do things and what the business objectives are. In addition, request a weekly update from the build, test and deployment areas on any upcoming releases, including any relevant information that will enable the service desk staff to provide a better service to the customer.
D) No immediate action required. You will work on a new training and communication policy that will formalize the process of communication and knowledge transfer between departments. You will also recommend that the first ITSM process to be implemented with be a formalized Incident Management process to ensure that effective measurements and analysis is taking place and that there is monitoring of staff competency and skill.