iCore’s client, a regulated water and sewerage company, faced the challenge of meeting increased Business demand which was proving increasingly difficult to manage and control.
iCore’s Engagement
Having identified the need to improve the management of demand across their SAP platform, the customer engaged with iCore to provide them with a capability review, gap analysis, roadmap and action plan to clearly identify the actionable steps to align their capacity and demand management capability to business requirements.
The Approach and Deliverables
For iCore to engage with all of the key representatives involved in providing the SAP management and support services quickly, a series of initial kick-off sessions were conducted so that a shared understanding of the purpose, focus and approach to the capability review was created from the very outset.
A series of separate ‘show and tell’ review sessions followed immediately afterwards with each of the key representative’s, to enable a deeper understanding of the current capabilities and challenges being faced.
iCore was able to rapidly establish that one of the main challenges facing the IT department was a lack of end-to-end visibility of increasing business demand across both the project and operational life-cycles. This lack of visibility, combined with different prioritisation schemes in use within the IT department, meant that these demands were proving difficult to resource plan effectively. The net effect of this was being felt in the ever increasing pressures within the IT department and the need to continually re-prioritise and divert resources in order to keep pace with, and react to, the escalating business needs and demands.
The capability review identified and confirmed to the client the specific areas causing the IT department to suffer through their inability to understand the existing demand and pipeline for future demand for the SAP platform. Based on the review findings iCore was able to provide a six-month roadmap that would enable the variety of demand from the business and the potential service impacts to be understood; and in-turn to translate this through capacity planning to manage and mitigate any risks to the overall operation of the business.
To identify potential investment requirements in support of any improvements, iCore undertook a review of the available IT Capacity Management tools against the client’s existing toolsets, and their existing platform management strategy. This identified the gaps that would need to be addressed as part of the improvement roadmap.
The Capacity Management toolset market review identified to the client that no current immediate investment was required as part of the business case to support the roadmap as sufficient tools were already in place. Instead the review identified that the client should continue to further develop and invest in the existing toolsets to maximise the currently under-utilised capabilities within these tools.
The provided roadmap showed the improvement activities that would be necessary to create the required capability within the client’s IT department, which through a knowledge transfer approach from iCore to the customers staff, would facilitate the step-change in capability while ensuring that it would be sufficiently embedded within the department.
At each phase the roadmap clearly focused on the need to be able to provide greater levels of assurance and performance management for the key business transactions and activities that depended on the SAP platform, and in building a body of knowledge necessary to be able to support the automation of alerting to enable more timely and increasingly pro-active responses from the IT Department to minimise and control Business impacts.
