October 5, 2017 at 18:28Royal Canin Service Desk Integration into Mars IS
In this publication, we will talk about how Mars IS managed to implement a project for the integration of the first level of the Royal Canin IT support service for users over half a year. Royal Canin technical support was transferred from the city of Emargues in southern France to Stupino.
Since 2006, the Mars Service Desk in Stupino has been providing IT support to Mars employees on a 24-hour, seven-day-week basis. In addition to their native Russian language, the service staff speak English, French and German.
The Royal Canin Service Desk service in марmargues consisted of four specialists supporting 1300 French employees. They also supported local IT teams in other countries. Almost all Mars IS teams were involved in the project. To work in it, it was necessary to find people with French and English, as well as knowledge in the field of IT or, at least, with a great desire to build a career in this field. In addition to interacting with recruitment agencies, we have established friendly relations with several Russian language universities. The training for beginners consisted of a three-week introductory course at the Mars Service Desk and two weeks of active work in receiving user calls, followed by an internship in France.
The project consisted of five areas: People, Knowledge, Tools, Processes and Communications.
At the first stage, a team of seven analysts was formed. The first participant came from an existing team and supervised the knowledge transfer process: he helped train new employees, allocated resources, working with escalating user requests, and tracked the overall results.
In the first three months, six more people were recruited. The selection criteria were good knowledge of English and French, focus on results and ability to learn. In addition to the team-wide, each participant had personal goals aimed at developing functional and leadership competencies.
After three weeks of training and two weeks of operational work, each newcomer joined the team, while continuing to study. Together with operational activities, participants tried to build effective interaction with second-level teams.
In the process of project implementation, we paid great attention to identifying key individuals. For example, working groups were organized with second-level teams supporting applications and infrastructure. All new employees were provided with travel-friendly laptop models. And the Telecoms team helped build a tunnel between Mars and Royal Canin, allowing you to quickly connect to local resources and users' computers.
By interviewing existing teams in France and Russia, a list of technologies was compiled that needed to be picked up for support. The list was replenished throughout the entire duration of the project.
New employees joined existing teams, watched their work, listened to calls and asked questions. It was originally planned that articles for the knowledge base would be composed of members of teams of the second and third levels. However, writing such texts took a long time, and their language was too complicated for first-level employees. As a result, we asked experts to talk about the solutions used by business, and members of the first-level teams wrote down and asked clarifying questions.
Documented solutions were tested by experts and entered into the knowledge base. It was decided that if the after-sales service does not have information about a particular solution, it escalates the incident to the next level without trying to solve it. In the first weeks after launch, this approach helped fill the knowledge base.
Great help in the operational launch of the service was provided by express internships in various departments, including production. Analysts were able to see how IT solutions support business processes.
In parallel with the training, a list of the necessary tools and accesses that employees must have was compiled, and remote infrastructure was configured.
We have compiled a list of IT processes that require the participation of Service Desk, as well as requests that traditionally were performed by the first-level support service that did not fall into the area of responsibility of the new service desk. We also agreed to create a team to issue equipment and work with incidents that require physical manipulation of the equipment.
Communication was built in two directions: informing IT hub teams about the progress of the project and working with users, which include an advertising campaign and training to work remotely with the Service Desk. The advertising campaign included internal communications: presentations, videos, posters, distribution of news about the stages of implementation of the Service Desk.
The work of Mars Service Desk was built on the practices of ITIL: Incident Management, Request Fulfilment and Knowledge Management. Agreements were reached on the level of service provision (SLA), the technologies and processes included in the area of responsibility of the team were identified, scenarios of interaction between the teams were considered, and rules were developed by which it passes.
The Major Incident Management process was not ignored, although the Service Desk team is not required to participate significantly in it. We determined which incidents could qualify for MIM, and which teams are responsible for the steps in this process. In particular, the responsibility of the first-level service department included the diagnosis of the incident and the collection of information necessary to determine the degree of its impact on the business. The interaction with users and the attraction of resources necessary to solve the incident came into the competence of the second-level support team.
Invaluable help in the implementation of ITSM processes was provided to us by the team responsible for their operation in Mars. The existing formal and informal processes have been studied in detail, they are compared with analogues in Mars and with a description in ITIL. We developed the implementation of each solution in the ITSM tool together. It is worth noting that although we tried to maximally reproduce the accepted and time-tested ways of working in Mars, various elements of the processes were edited in accordance with ITIL recommendations and taking into account the realities of the business. We also decided not to rush with the introduction of a single tool for registering requests.
The first calls began to arrive in Russia on December 1, 2012. In the first three months, we were able to meet the requirements for several key performance indicators: the coefficient of solving the problem during the first call (First Call Resolution> 75%), the average waiting time for subscribers, before receiving a response (Average Time of Answer <10 sec), level agreement provision of services for timely resolution of incidents (SLA> 90%) and a number of others.
Our employees were able to immerse themselves in work at a factory in France, after which they arrived with the acquired skills in Russia. We also built ITSM processes from scratch to escalate user requests into second- and third-level teams based in France.
A year after the start of the project, Royal Canin and Mars IT support teams were merged into one Service Desk. Up to 2,000 calls from Royal Canin and about the same from Mars come in a month. In addition to operational work, employees perform tasks that ensure continuous improvement of the quality of services, participate in projects to increase efficiency, and train users to work with Self-Service Portal and other automation tools.
Now several team members are participating in a large project to standardize infrastructure and ITSM processes at Royal Canin. We will tell you about this in a separate publication. We are sure that it will be interesting!
Project
Since 2006, the Mars Service Desk in Stupino has been providing IT support to Mars employees on a 24-hour, seven-day-week basis. In addition to their native Russian language, the service staff speak English, French and German.
The Royal Canin Service Desk service in марmargues consisted of four specialists supporting 1300 French employees. They also supported local IT teams in other countries. Almost all Mars IS teams were involved in the project. To work in it, it was necessary to find people with French and English, as well as knowledge in the field of IT or, at least, with a great desire to build a career in this field. In addition to interacting with recruitment agencies, we have established friendly relations with several Russian language universities. The training for beginners consisted of a three-week introductory course at the Mars Service Desk and two weeks of active work in receiving user calls, followed by an internship in France.
The project consisted of five areas: People, Knowledge, Tools, Processes and Communications.
People
At the first stage, a team of seven analysts was formed. The first participant came from an existing team and supervised the knowledge transfer process: he helped train new employees, allocated resources, working with escalating user requests, and tracked the overall results.
In the first three months, six more people were recruited. The selection criteria were good knowledge of English and French, focus on results and ability to learn. In addition to the team-wide, each participant had personal goals aimed at developing functional and leadership competencies.
After three weeks of training and two weeks of operational work, each newcomer joined the team, while continuing to study. Together with operational activities, participants tried to build effective interaction with second-level teams.
In the process of project implementation, we paid great attention to identifying key individuals. For example, working groups were organized with second-level teams supporting applications and infrastructure. All new employees were provided with travel-friendly laptop models. And the Telecoms team helped build a tunnel between Mars and Royal Canin, allowing you to quickly connect to local resources and users' computers.
Knowledge
By interviewing existing teams in France and Russia, a list of technologies was compiled that needed to be picked up for support. The list was replenished throughout the entire duration of the project.
New employees joined existing teams, watched their work, listened to calls and asked questions. It was originally planned that articles for the knowledge base would be composed of members of teams of the second and third levels. However, writing such texts took a long time, and their language was too complicated for first-level employees. As a result, we asked experts to talk about the solutions used by business, and members of the first-level teams wrote down and asked clarifying questions.
Documented solutions were tested by experts and entered into the knowledge base. It was decided that if the after-sales service does not have information about a particular solution, it escalates the incident to the next level without trying to solve it. In the first weeks after launch, this approach helped fill the knowledge base.
Great help in the operational launch of the service was provided by express internships in various departments, including production. Analysts were able to see how IT solutions support business processes.
Instruments
In parallel with the training, a list of the necessary tools and accesses that employees must have was compiled, and remote infrastructure was configured.
The processes
We have compiled a list of IT processes that require the participation of Service Desk, as well as requests that traditionally were performed by the first-level support service that did not fall into the area of responsibility of the new service desk. We also agreed to create a team to issue equipment and work with incidents that require physical manipulation of the equipment.
Communication
Communication was built in two directions: informing IT hub teams about the progress of the project and working with users, which include an advertising campaign and training to work remotely with the Service Desk. The advertising campaign included internal communications: presentations, videos, posters, distribution of news about the stages of implementation of the Service Desk.
The work of Mars Service Desk was built on the practices of ITIL: Incident Management, Request Fulfilment and Knowledge Management. Agreements were reached on the level of service provision (SLA), the technologies and processes included in the area of responsibility of the team were identified, scenarios of interaction between the teams were considered, and rules were developed by which it passes.
The Major Incident Management process was not ignored, although the Service Desk team is not required to participate significantly in it. We determined which incidents could qualify for MIM, and which teams are responsible for the steps in this process. In particular, the responsibility of the first-level service department included the diagnosis of the incident and the collection of information necessary to determine the degree of its impact on the business. The interaction with users and the attraction of resources necessary to solve the incident came into the competence of the second-level support team.
Invaluable help in the implementation of ITSM processes was provided to us by the team responsible for their operation in Mars. The existing formal and informal processes have been studied in detail, they are compared with analogues in Mars and with a description in ITIL. We developed the implementation of each solution in the ITSM tool together. It is worth noting that although we tried to maximally reproduce the accepted and time-tested ways of working in Mars, various elements of the processes were edited in accordance with ITIL recommendations and taking into account the realities of the business. We also decided not to rush with the introduction of a single tool for registering requests.
Summary
The first calls began to arrive in Russia on December 1, 2012. In the first three months, we were able to meet the requirements for several key performance indicators: the coefficient of solving the problem during the first call (First Call Resolution> 75%), the average waiting time for subscribers, before receiving a response (Average Time of Answer <10 sec), level agreement provision of services for timely resolution of incidents (SLA> 90%) and a number of others.
Our employees were able to immerse themselves in work at a factory in France, after which they arrived with the acquired skills in Russia. We also built ITSM processes from scratch to escalate user requests into second- and third-level teams based in France.
A year after the start of the project, Royal Canin and Mars IT support teams were merged into one Service Desk. Up to 2,000 calls from Royal Canin and about the same from Mars come in a month. In addition to operational work, employees perform tasks that ensure continuous improvement of the quality of services, participate in projects to increase efficiency, and train users to work with Self-Service Portal and other automation tools.
Now several team members are participating in a large project to standardize infrastructure and ITSM processes at Royal Canin. We will tell you about this in a separate publication. We are sure that it will be interesting!