Services
Assessment, formalisation, tooling, operations. Each of these four can be commissioned on its own.
Together they form a sequence in which each service builds on the previous one.
The work follows ITIL, in the shape that fits the operation. It is delivered asinterim management.
Two starting situations. One first question.
You have taken over a service and have to bring it into regular operation.
For example
A support contract states "reasonable effort" as its response time. The provider reads that as after the weekend, the business unit as immediately.
The case in detailA service runs, but not steadily and not the way you would expect.
For example
Users report that faulty data is having serious consequences. Those records can only be spotted days later, in the next report.
The case in detailIn both cases we first establish what actually applies today.
Each can be commissioned on its own. In a clear sequence.
Each service assumes that the previous one works in daily practice. Which one you need depends on where you stand.
Current-state analysis of contracts, documentation and processes
Result
A dependable picture of the current state. Which contracts, documents and processes exist, how much of that is known and followed, and where paper and practice diverge.
The assessment holds contracts, documentation and processes against day-to-day work. Three things are compared: what is agreed in writing, what is known, and what people actually work by.
The review covers what exists: contracts and service agreements (SLAs, SLOs, OLAs) and the process documentation. That includes incident management, problem management and change enablement, plus the knowledge base, the reports and the service management tool. Alongside this we speak with the people who run the service every day, about what works and about what gets in their way.
Three questions establish the current state. Is there anything in writing? Do the people involved know it? Does it match what they actually do? The third question at the latest shows whether a documented process is really followed. A process that exists only on paper explains why the same case takes two people different lengths of time.
Contracts go through the same test. A phrase such as “reasonable effort” for a response time reads as harmless and causes recurring conflict in operation, because provider and business unit understand it differently. Where it makes sense, first measures start during the analysis itself, for example an adjusted report.
Has been the entire engagement more than once.
Making processes and responsibilities binding
Result
A form whose fields come from practice, clear responsibilities, and a procedure the people involved support because they helped build it.
Day-to-day practice becomes binding process: clear responsibilities, consistent procedures, and forms whose fields have proven themselves in real work.
What becomes binding is what has proven itself in daily work. A new procedure therefore does not start with a finished form. In the first week everyone involved writes their cases as free text, with no mandatory fields and no prescribed structure. It looks untidy. Afterwards it is settled which follow-up questions were needed again and again. Exactly those questions become the form, not the ones somebody thought up at a desk.
Responsibilities are fixed the same way: who accepts a case, who works on it and who closes it. The result is a set of standardised procedures, in incident management or change work for example, that the people involved helped to build themselves. That is the difference between a rule that holds and a rule that gets worked around.
Selection and rollout
Result
The proven procedures, forms and responsibilities are already set up or are being set up in the service management tool. Whatever remains open at that point does not travel in with it.
Selection and rollout of the service management tool: only what ran steadily beforehand gets set up. The established process comes first, the software second.
A form that has not changed for four weeks is ready for the tool. Not before. The procedure comes first, then it is reproduced in software. Whoever starts with the tool carries the still-open questions straight into the new structure.
Selection therefore comes down to one thing above all: the tool has to reproduce the proven procedures, forms and responsibilities. Only what has proven itself in operation gets set up; whatever is still open does not travel in with it. Which product it turns out to be is secondary. We have worked with ServiceNow, Jira, Remedy and Topdesk, among others.
Reporting and continual improvement
Result
Regular service reporting on the state of operations, a list of the next improvements, and the ability to give a concrete assessment when something breaks.
Regular service reporting and continual improvement in live operation: disruptions become visible, and response and recovery times become predictable.
Once the service is live, it shows whether the new structure works. Regular service reporting makes visible where cases stall, how long recovery takes and which disruptions keep returning. These numbers become the list of the next improvements: continual improvement rather than a one-off changeover.
The goal is not the perfect metric. The goal is being able to say, when something breaks: we need three days. Instead of: nobody knows when it will run again.
The four services are delivered as an engagement, not as a project with a handover date.
That means we take on the role that is missing or overloaded, for as long as the work takes, and hand it back afterwards. The usual occasion is a vacant IT leadership, or a service someone has newly taken over.
What separates this from consulting is the accountability. We do not recommend how a procedure should look. We introduce it and stay until it holds without us. How long that takes and how it is billed is set out directly below.
An operation whose state you know.
Clear accountabilities, procedures everyone carries out the same way, and statements you can rely on, including when the news is unwelcome.
What we do not promise: that nothing will break again. Depending on what fails, restoring it takes the time it takes. It becomes steerable and predictable nonetheless.
Four questions come up in almost every first conversation, answered here directly. Anyone who wants to see the credentials first will find them under Certificates and credentials.
In eleven industries, among them energy, pharmaceuticals, banking and financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, insurance, aviation, chemicals, logistics, construction and metalworking.
The specialist applications differ from industry to industry, and for those you have your own experts. Our work is the service management around them: whether processes work, who is accountable, whether the operation can be steered. Those questions are the same in every industry.
Yes. We work both remotely and on site.
Being there in person is not a courtesy. An engagement changes how colleagues work, and that succeeds better in the next room than on a video call. How many days it actually becomes follows from your structure and from the phase of the engagement; the number is agreed, not imposed.
What has to be checked against documents, contracts, documentation and processes, is independent of location. We work throughout Germany.
We do not promise that nothing will break again. Depending on what fails, recovery takes the time it takes.
What can change is what you are able to say while it lasts. The goal is being able to say, when something breaks: we need three days. Instead of: nobody knows when it will run again. That takes clear accountabilities, a practised procedure and reporting that shows the actual state.
There is one more thing, and it appears in no process description: composure. It has irritated superiors before.
After an update, a CIO could no longer get into his laptop. It held the papers for a board meeting that was about to start. He walked through the office with the machine in his hand. We waited until he was approachable and restored the login in time.
Another time a CFO had picked up ransomware that reached the network drives. He stood there, agitated, asking what had to be done now. The local network colleague was on leave, the nearshore colleagues had finished for the day. We went calmly through our own records, found a suitable colleague in the United States and alerted him.
By the hour, on actual effort. There is no day rate. A day rate applies regardless of how much there actually was to do that day, and by the hour is fairer for both sides.
What an engagement costs overall depends on its length and its scope. Past engagements ran between three months and two and a half years, most of them one to two years. The assessment has been the entire engagement more than once. What that means for your situation becomes clear in the first conversation, once the scope is settled.
Next step
Three examples under Expertise and Approach show what these services look like in practice.
Or the direct way