Power Design Inc is an innovative Design-Build, Multi-Trade Contractor operating across the United States, working across multiple construction trades. The company’s dedicated IT department consists of 5 distinct areas of IT; Infrastructure & Operations, Field Technology, Software Engineering, IT Programs & Technology Experience. The commitment of these divisions, and the IT department is to provide exceptional service and experiences to customers and employees.
Choosing the Service Desk Certification journey
In 2021, Power Design joined SDI’s Service Desk Certification (SDC) program. “We chose to embark upon our SDC journey as we wanted an objective and non-biased evaluation of the service and experience we provide to our employees and customers.“
“As well as providing insight into areas for improvement, we were confident SDC would also help us design a roadmap for the years to come. To ensure not only great service and experiences now -but also for the future of the company as it scales and grows.”
At our first SDC audit, seven out of the nine concept areas were below where we needed them to be to reach a 4 star result. We wanted to ensure we took a holistic approach when creating our roadmap for continuous improvement, so we broke up the work to accomplish these improvements into what we call ‘Epics’ and scheduled them through our SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) program. This allowed us to focus on the tasks at hand and ensure that we could make the necessary improvements while also not sacrificing any quality in the areas where we had achieved perfect four scores.
Here is the Power Design team in 2022 celebrating their ‘3’ star Certification achievement.
From 3 stars to 4 in just one year!
The greatest change we have made within our service desk since starting our SDC journey is maturing our approach to processes and documentation – ensuring transparency and knowledge across the department.
The documentation of our program, processes, procedures, and continuous improvement efforts has added clarity for the team today and for the future ahead. The evidential requirements of the SDC programme ensured that everyone had access to vital information and knowledge across all of these areas, which ultimately removed the barrier of “you don’t know what you don’t know”.
The most valuable aspect from an SDI roadmap for us, is that it helps to eliminate guess work on what will help your service desk move to the next level. Additionally, it provides a tangible guide for everyone on the team. A vision statement and a mission statement are incredibly important and powerful, but the SDI roadmap helps chart the path in the accomplishment of those things.
Changes and Improvements
The greatest change we have experienced with our Certification is a maturity in our consistency. Prior to the SDC program, we felt as if we were doing a lot of things well, and in truth I still believe we were however, most of those things were passed by word of mouth and tacit knowledge. But SDC requires evidence to show you are doing what you say you are doing and that requires documentation. The focus on documenting our processes, procedures and even expectations has allowed for greater consistency as we grow and bring on new members to the team. It is much easier for someone to join the team and know how we operate or even for more seasoned members to find how we handle an obscure issue that may not occur often enough for them to have experienced it along their individual journey.
The requirement from SDC to document how, what, and – most importantly – why we do what we do ensures a consistent, reliable, best-in-class support experience for all our employees. As a result, we can define career paths, roles, and responsibilities, as well as how to perform them at the highest levels.
Impact
“This has increased consistency and understanding, boosted morale, increased engagement, solidified buy-in to our mission, and allowed us to add business value while simultaneously improving our customer/employee support experience.”
Our largest area of focus was ensuring that we were meeting the aggressive goals we had set for ourselves in regard to Management Information and Performance Results. This was our largest area of improvement as when we went through our original Certification, we had not been hitting those targets for the last six months and our reporting was a bit cumbersome. Accordingly, we quickly enhanced our reporting capabilities which allowed us to keep a better eye on whether we were achieving all our targets over time and that ultimately allowed us to drive that score up over .6 points. As you might assume with this being our greatest opportunity for improvement, this was the one concept area we did not achieve our desired score in, during our surveillance audit, but that’s what continuous improvement is for! Next year, we hope to rectify that while ensuring we don’t lose sight of all we’ve accomplished in the last few years.
A transformational partnership
SDC has produced many benefits for us. Firstly, I believe that it has allowed our desk to become more mature in its operations ensuring consistency over time. Secondly, the consistency brought by SDC ensures the service desk will continue to operate at high levels, or at least is set up for success, long after I or any other team member has exited their roles. Third, I am thankful that SDC covers such a wide array of concept areas to include corporate social responsibility-I believe this reinforces the focus on things greater than ourselves which is vitally important in a service role. Fourth, the success we have had with the SDC solidifies the value we add for our business and removes the subjectivity of individual perspectives. We have an external, globally accepted, objective measure on our performance which leaves little room for debate. Lastly, but certainly not least, the relationships we have made along our journey are nothing short of brilliant. There is so much great talent and just great people in our industry that we can learn from and the SDC journey with SDI has allowed us to meet and learn from so many of them.
Celebrating success
I am most proud of the dedication of the ATLAS team, the collaboration across all the departments at PDI to help make this possible and the community that we have all developed together. There is an old adage, that I think is very true: If you want to go fast go alone, but if you want to go far go together.
“This is a journey that cannot and should not be taken alone. It is an organizational endeavour and together we have been able to achieve service desk excellence and will continue striving to improve even more leaning on those tenants of dedication, collaboration and community.”
“I am blessed to work with some of the most dedicated, tenacious, and customer-focused individuals in the industry. I have been operating in the support world for 2 decades now and this is far and away the highest performing, most customer-centric team I have ever had the privilege of being a part of. Every day they pursue excellence and they are never satisfied with the status quo. I am excited to see how we only improve!”
Power Design scooped ‘Service Desk Of The Year 2023’ Award!
What’s next
At a high level, we are focused on changing the way support is provided. We intend to be more proactive than reactive by finding and resolving issues before they impact the end user.
A year ago roughly 25% of the tickets we closed were proactive efforts. The aim for these is to improve a customer/employee’s experience and minimise the negative impact of downtime or inoperability on the business. Our goal for this year was to move from 25% to 33% of all of our efforts being proactive rather than reactive. We currently average around 30-35% of proactive efforts each month so we are on track for that. Our intention next year is to be at a minimum of 44.4% proactive efforts.
“Personally, I am fully bought into SDI and the SDC. I think it is a fantastic organization with a brilliant tool to help set up service desk teams for great success. I am proud to be associated with all of it and I look forward to the future and my continued interactions with both SDI and the SDC.”
We have our eyes set on achieving SDI’s ‘World-Class Certification’ and will continue to strive toward that goal.
“I would absolutely recommend the SDC programme. SDI does not benefit or suffer based on the score they provide, that objectivity & experience evaluation is priceless in achieving world-class service levels.”
With big thanks to Josh Nelson, Director of Technology Experience, Power Design Inc.
Want to know if your service is ready for SDC?
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