Many of my clients consults me in the following way often in my day-to-day sales activities.
‘We want to “visualize” our operations in the IT department.’
When I carefully listened to what they were talking, I understood that they wanted to ‘Visualize’ their operations to correspond to demands of improvement of the information system, among a lot of business in the IT department. They say they wanted to “Visualize” how they are corresponding to the demands of improvement which have been gathered from the working floor (Department of Users).
Why do they want to do so?
Talking about “Visualization”, what do they want to show to whom?
- What? : The situation of the operations of corresponding to the demands of improvement
- To whom? : Workers on the working floor who are demanding (User department)
You can easily guess Who and What. Well then, WHY do they want to “Visualize”?
That is because ‘they want to make the IT department be reliable‘.
In general, they say it is difficult to know what the IT department staffs are doing, on the prospect from the working floor (User department). In addition, there is a problem of growth of dissatisfaction from the fact that it is difficult to understand the situation whether the staffs of the IT department is corresponding to the requests which Users on the working floor (User department) have made in a variety ways.
The staffs of the IT department are working hard on receiving a lot of requests and demands for improvement from the entire company, and making their schedule to correspond by giving priorities. However, because their efforts are not able to be seen by the members of other departments, they are suspected of ignoring those requests and demands.
Therefore, they want to reduce dissatisfaction of the User department and increase their reliability by visualizing the operations of corresponding to improvement requests which are larger contact point with the User department, so that the User department can confirm how the IT department are corresponding anytime.
Behind the scene of the words they say ‘We want to “visualize” our operations in the IT department’, there are their wills that to become reliable IT department.
How a Process of Corresponding to Requests should be?
The operation of corresponding to the requests which come from the working floor (User department) is almost like a flow as follows.
- A worker in User department draws up a draft plan collecting improvement demands.
- The supervisor of the worker gives approval to it upon confirming its contents.
- A receptionist in the IT department checks the content of the draft, and estimates how many steps will it take, so that to make a schedule to finish it.
- Responsible person gives an approval to the schedule.
- Engineers conduct development and verification according to the request.
- Quality manager confirms the result of #5.
- User department confirms the improvement.
At the working floor (user department), their request will be submitted upon a consideration how their demands should be, rather than requesting all the demand for improvement blindly.
At the IT department, they will correspond to the demand with assigning the staffs after accepting the request. In this situation, as the User department is a client of the IT department, a quality checking will be conducted on the newly developed improved system before its implementation.
For the User department, they will care very much if the processing of their request is proceeded to #6 or still staying at #3 above.
For the “Visualization” of the Request-corresponding Process cases above, please consult us anytime. We also have actual examples of the solution utilizing “Questetra BPM Suite”, a Cloud-based Workflow.
Three aspects of taking advantage of Questetra BPM Suite
As I mentioned above, we have actual cases of realizing “Visualization” of the Request-corresponding Process utilizing “Questetra BPM Suite”. And here are the reasons why they chose our “Questetra BPM Suite”.
- It is not a Workflow that specializes in application-approval.
- It is capable of incorporating various automatic processing.
- It allows to monitor the progress in graphical screen.
Before introducing “Questetra BPM Suite”, they used to utilize Email and Excel, or to use common simple Workflow. However, they had difficulties of inflexibility and information sharing.
Conclusion
In order to aim the “trusted IT department”, it is important to keep the status of operations in the IT department visible to the working floor (User department). In particular, it is important to “Visualize” the corresponding operations to the improvement demand of information systems, which is the contact point between the IT department and the working floor (User department).
Please contact me whenever you need to “Visualize” your business operations with “Questetra BPM Suite”!
That’s it for today!
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