I was handed a project that was moving from one vendor to my organisation. The reason was obvious: the customer was unhappy with the old vendor’s poor performance.
It was an Informatica admin service. The team handled user access, monitored Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) jobs, fixed failures in cron jobs, scheduled jobs and built reports, all within Service Level Agreements (SLA)s the business had defined. When I took over, we had a backlog of 300+ service requests, and they had already breached the 3-day resolution SLA.
I had never led a project in such bad shape. I was thrilled and nervous at the same time. I had to pull up my socks.
Building the team first
The business needed 24x7 support, so we needed night shifts. Finding people with the right skills for nights was a real challenge. I ran a rigorous evaluation before choosing anyone.
My team was 13 people, and only 4 of them were seasoned infra-admins. The rest were less experienced. The real challenge was the roster. I decided to put one seasoned person in every shift and tag a junior to them as a buddy. The buddy also reviewed the junior’s work before it went back to a business user.
I also defined a backup for unplanned leave, in round robin. Whoever has the next shift turns up if the person on the current shift doesn’t. This really helped us keep the roster intact.
Getting the knowledge out of the old vendor
Next, I needed to understand how the work was actually done. I asked for knowledge transition calls, Standard Operations Procedure (SOP), ServiceNow portal access, and a clear view of the backlog.
It took many rounds of calls, and the old vendor had very little willingness to share. I involved the right people and sometimes escalated to the customer to get information quickly. Project documents were the hardest to get. After the escalation, we received them.
The daily call
Vendor gone, now my team had to perform. This was my chance to prove myself and to keep the confidence my team and managers had in me.
The first thing I did was set up a daily call with the customer. He was extremely demanding and irritated by the earlier vendor. In the beginning, those calls were really hard. Every day I heard everything that wasn’t working, and his next question was always, “How do you fix this?” I came out of those calls overwhelmed, but with points to work on.
The same five problems came up again and again:
- An underperforming team
- Skills that weren’t up to the mark
- A huge backlog (300+)
- Service requests not closed within the 3-business-day SLA
- Gaps between shifts
The five fixes
I built a process for each problem:
- Technical training sessions for the skills gap: Weekly sessions for Informatica admin technical
- Buddy review, so no junior’s response reached the business unchecked. This helped accuracy in updating SRs.
- One dedicated person to assign service requests to the right engineer, so nothing waited. This helped in correct assignment for right candidate as per availability, which resulted in on time resolution.
- A dashboard tracking every assigned request which helped with clear visibility of service requests
- A handover email between every shift, listing what was done and what was pending. Pending items were handled with utmost care which removed possibility of delay in request closure.
Then I gave the customer access to the live dashboard, so he could see the status of every request in ServiceNow himself. Now the work wasn’t something I described on a call. He could see it. He was thrilled to see live data and to see where the team was heading. It gave him confidence that things were coming back on track.
What changed over the nine months
Slowly, the team started to understand the pattern and gained the expertise. They began looking for process improvements and automation. One example was automating password reset requests, which were being handled manually before. This removed almost 10-15 requests per month involving 20 mins per request of human efforts. That took repetitive, non-creative work off their shoulders.
I also started a monthly team lunch. It was a relaxed break, and it helped the team bond and trust each other with work and ask for help. I could see an enthusiasm for taking on any challenge that wasn’t there earlier.
The results
- Backlog: 300+ at the start, 0 at the end
- SLA breaches: 90% at the start, 0% at the end
- CSI: 20% to 60% to 100%
The CSI was measured quarterly through an online survey the customer filled in, with multiple questions on what was working and what wasn’t. When the survey came back at 100% (after almost 9 months), I was blown away.
What I’d tell another delivery lead
Make the work visible to the customer. Giving him live access to the dashboard did more than any status call. Service Now Dashboards with various categories: numbers by week, by month, by assigned to people, On time closure, Backlog etc
Take the customer’s complaints in his own order. His five complaints became my five fixes.
A mostly junior team can work if the structure carries them. With 4 seasoned people out of 13, the buddy system and the shift handover made the difference.
Don’t wait for the old vendor to cooperate. I escalated and got the documents I needed.
Conclusion
The team didn’t change. It was still 13 people, with only 4 seasoned admins. What changed was the structure around them, and the customer could see it working.