Productivity and improvement of knowledge workers in B-Company IT Service Company / Raquel D. Tarroza

Year : 2010

Number of Pages : 33 leaves

Executive Summary

In 2003, B-Company, a leading technology company, won a 3 billion 10 year contract to manage A-company's IT infrastructure. The scope of the contract calls for B-company to manage A-company's data centers and IT infrastructure, to provide desktop and end-user support and to oversee network management. In addition, B-company will develop and maintain applications for A-company's global operations. Re-negotiation of the deal with commence on the contract's 7th year anniversary. Among the key customer's expectations are the introduction of innovation tools to support service delivery and to reduce the cost of delivery and the introduction of process improvements to streamline the current service delivery operations. As a response to this requirement, B-company has implemented several productivity and efficiency projects in order to introduce tools and to achieve the required cost reduction. In order to effectively assess the resulting productivity, a corporate standard time tracking tool was implemented to categorize the work executed by B-Company's employees and to baseline the work effort expended by the employees against these work categories. Pilot deployment of the time tracking tool was implemented for 3 pilot teams over a period of three months. Work categories were created based on the actual work conducted by the employees of the pilot teams. Work effort was collected and analyzed in order to assess the feasibility of achieving the required cost reduction. Results of the pilot deployment showed opportunity areas were an estimated 40 percent productivity can be achieved by the deployment of automation tools. Brainstorming sessions were conducted to conduct in-depth analysis of the results. Requirements for the automation tool were documented. In addition, an estimated 20 percent productivity can also be achieved by the introduction for process improvements. Areas to which these improvements are to be implemented were identified and action steps formulated.