|
Agile Development Conference & Better Software Conference West
June 2–7, 2013 | Las Vegas, NV
The Internal Customer
Andy Jordan PMP is the founder and president of Roffensian Consulting. Andy is a seasoned business professional with experience in many industries on two continents. After a career managing high profile, business critical projects for many organisations Andy moved into leadership of project management offices and built a reputation for building, rescuing and improving this key function. His approach of tailoring processes to the style and ability of the organisation, and focusing on the development of project staff rather than the short sighted approach of meeting project deliverables at all costs has repeatedly shown dramatic results.
This month, gantthead is looking at ITIL and CRM, and that got me thinking (which I guess it was supposed to do!). For many organizations, ITIL is simply an inward-facing concept--they use it to manage the relationship with internal business units and departments but they rely on formal contracts and service level agreements to manage the relationship with clients. In contrast, customer relationship management--whether we refer to the process or the software tool--tends to be an externally facing concept. It’s something we apply to those outside of the organization that buy products and services from us (or whom we have identified as potentially buying from us).
It made me think that maybe we should consider our internal customers as just that--customers. I don’t mean that we stop using ITIL and start entering them into our CRM system, but we should provide them with the same standard of service--and expect the same level of commitment from them.
The problem of internal customers
If we consider IT as a service provider to the rest of the organization, then we are effectively a vendor. We may not get paid directly for the products and services we deliver, but we are a cost that has to be borne by the revenue-generating areas of the business--and that makes us subject to certain expectations from the business units that we serve.
If we consider IT as a service provider to the rest of the organization, then we are effectively a vendor. We may not get paid directly for the products and services we deliver, but we are a cost that has to be borne by the revenue-generating areas of the business--and that makes us subject to certain expectations from the business units that we serve.
ITIL can help us to manage those …
Please login or register below to read the rest of the article.
ADVERTISEMENTS
|
"Be Yourself" is about the worst advice you can give to people. - Mark Twain |