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Four-Step Process for Identifying Root Cause and "Stopping the Pain"
"Pain" is often the motivator to address the problems in an IT operation. Unfortunately, there's usually a high pain tolerance in most organizations - which may sound like a positive - but pain is a sign of inefficiency, a source of negative morale, and a drain on productivity. And all that translates into lost money: diminished revenue opportunity and increased expenses.
Even worse are the pain points that you don't see or feel, yet have a significant impact on the ability to conduct business in an efficient, cost-effective manner. And since they can't be seen, there is usually no driver to remediate these hidden threats.
Using the Four-Step process depicted below, the TouchPointe technology professionals can quickly identify and remediate all the opportunities in the IT organization. Though the process is quite simple, it requires experienced enterprise professionals to parse the data, identify root cause, and then develop the correct solution.
Each step of the process requires an increasing level of expertise and strategic understanding.
Step 1: Identify the Indicators:
Some are obvious (multiple outages, lost data, poor service, high failure rates) while others are less visible (missed deadlines, lack of metrics / reporting, poor morale). The experienced professionals at TouchPointe have decades of experience in identifying these indicators and showing the financial impact to the overall business operation. Others may be false indicators, so care must be taken to properly identity and organize the results. The most important part of this first step is to identify and parse the problem indicators - both those on the surface as well as the less obvious - and equate these indicators to a financial impact.
Step 2: Organize the Indicators into Triggers:
Multiple indicators may point to one or two triggers. For example, if a client is experiencing poor email performance on a regular basis, there may be a few triggers: poor network performance, a PC issue, or an issue with the email server itself - or a combination of all three. Often, a "quick diagnosis" may be made be a technician which may not be an inclusive approach. While this is a simple situation, the scenario is a classic example of a single pain point with multiple triggers that requires a broader approach.
Step 3: Determine Root Cause:
Determining the Root Cause is critical to remediating the problem and developing the strategic, cost-effective solution. In almost all cases, the obvious and tactical approach is taken, often masking the root cause or initial point of the problem. This invariably leads to repeat incidents, rework, lost productivity and higher support costs. In the example above, all three triggers may be valid, but none of which are the root cause. The root cause is likely to be an issue with testing and deployment of the application (email, in this case). Had the application be properly developed, tested, and deployed, the three triggers would have been identified and re-mediated in advance, thus avoiding hours of lost time and extra support costs to resolve a simple process problem.
Step 4: The Strategic Solution:
This final, and most critical part of the process includes the strategic solution that remediates the root cause, best practices for future learnings, and the financial benefit - all three components are equally important. In our email example, the simple approach of "re-installing the program" or "increasing bandwidth" might address the symptoms, but will not remediate the cause. Equally valuable is to take the learnings from this problem and apply it horizontally to all processes with the IT organization. Using decades of experience, the daily pain points in IT can quickly be remediated and turned from a financial liability into a productivity asset.
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