Ken has just joined the team as Senior Service Delivery Manager. He brings a wealth of new ideas and experience to the business, having delivered a number of major IT transformation projects and services for Public Services and commercial organisations across the UK and US. Here we take a few minutes to get to know him, and a bit about his new role at Incremental Group.
Welcome to Incremental Group. Can you tell us what you do?
I’ve just joined the business as Senior Service Delivery Manager. My role is initially all about improving our service management processes – to enhance delivery to, and experience for, customers.
What exactly is Service Management?
Service Management is a methodology that defines and structures – in a modular way – what we offer customers, and how we deliver. This allows us to measure how successful we are in delivering, and improve performance over time. There is no difference between customer facing and internal delivery – it is all structured in the same way, and follows the same processes, which provides an incentive to improve the service.
The concept has been around for a while. I think ITIL, the set of practices for IT Service Management that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business, initially started to come about in the late ‘80’s. It’s really been embraced and adopted, particularly in the public sector, to better structure contracts, and improve the service they get from suppliers.
How did you get into Service Management?
My initial involvement in Service Management was a few years ago delivering services in SIAM (service integration and management) modules. This is where the customer puts a number of services into towers (like data center, service management) and they are joined up to create a seamless experience for the end customer. I was involved in the application management tower. It was my first experience of thinking and operating like this. Luckily it went well for us – I think because we really embraced it – and this resulted in a very successful relationship with the customer. My team even won an excellence award for service delivery – the structure of the project to actually deliver the SIAM. However, as many suppliers were new to this way of thinking, I think it really caught them out. By design, it ensures you are delivering something of quality to the customers. If you don’t deliver the service well, you can be replaced, and I’ve seen this happen in a few cases.
Getting to this this point in my career, has been a natural progression for me. I started out in an old style help desk. From there I moved into Project Management and Consultancy. I was then the Senior Project Manager on a number of large scale deliveries, transitioning them into services. So this new role at Incremental Group really allows me to complete the full circle.
What do you enjoy about your role?
I like working closely with people, our customers, to understand their challenges and come up with innovative ways to help fix them. This can be through the smart use of technology, but it is often innovation in process that can deliver the biggest improvements.
Why did you join Incremental Group?
I wanted to work with the team, who are really good at what they do, I have a lot of respect for and know I will enjoy working with. That makes such a difference. Also, it’s important for me to be part of a business that has, what I think, are the right principles. Here I can see a customer centric approach to delivery, that’s focused on quality – both in terms of the technologies we use and the people we have. Furthermore, I am involved in something exciting from the outset and have the opportunity to help shape something phenomenal.
How have you spent your first week?
Day one was in the Tontine Building in Glasgow, where I will be based, getting all set up. On Tuesday I set off for Inverurie for the remainder of the week. There I met the rest of the team, got an understanding of how the business currently works, and started to refamiliarise myself with the Microsoft solutions stack – I’ve been away from it for a few years. The move to the cloud has definitely taken it in the right direction. The tools look to be much improved and with a lot more out of the box, which is good – less need for code. The licensing is still pretty complicated though!
What’s next?
I’m starting to shape my thoughts on how our new approach to service design might work. Once we have a new service management process in place, giving us a really solid base to work from, I’m looking forward to seeing what we can deliver on top. I’m looking forward to working on larger, more complicated projects and rapid growth. Honestly, I am.