My 2 Cents
Every Tuesday I'm giving you practical tips and ideas on an area of leadership, team building or service management. These can be found on my social media sites, but on this page, you'll find links to the articles that inspired them. If you missed any, click the link on the article title to visit them in TikTok!
The biggest issue with the portal employee or user experience is that portals are typically designed by technical folks to scale their ability to provide support. Instead, the portal needs to be integrated into a support vision and designed for the customer experience. Visit the link below to read my 5 Tips to Improve Your Service Portal.
This week I offered tips on using a standard process for baking bread. Here's my method and recipe for Sourdough bread:
Remember, consistency comes from using a consistent process. Here’s my sourdough bread process:
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Move half the starter to the mixing bowl (for my starter, that is 6 ounces)
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Feed the starter ½ cup of flour and ½ cup of water
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Add 3 ½ cups of flour to the bowl
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Add 1 cup of warm water to the bowl (110° - 120° F)
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Add 1 Tablespoon of coarse salt
Blend with the dough hook until it comes into a ball, or knead it for 10 minutes and form a ball
Allow the dough to rest for 15 minutes, then form it into a loaf or ball. I place it in a loaf pan for sandwich slices.
Allow to sit until later in the day: my process calls for making the loaf at 9 am and baking it just before dinner.
Bake at 350°for 45-55 minutes, until deep golden brown. If desired, brush with water for an artisan appearance, egg for a shiny top or milk for a softer crust.
The SMO can offer many advantages. This week I go off-book, offering two ways your SMO can be used beyond the governance of the ITSM initiative. When you're done with the video, you can read this blog to learn more about why I believe the SMO is no longer a luxury!
In this episode, I talk about ways leading and lagging indicators can be used to measure things that are difficult to see using A1C and daily glucose checks. The blog below talks more about them and how leading and lagging indicators can be used to measure innovation.
Check Before Starting: Regardless of the service, check first with users and stakeholders. Gather them in a room and walk through their current processes and pain points. Some use digital blueprints or journey maps to help with this. Value stream mapping is also a great way to walk through the current provisioning side of a process and discover bottlenecks. Once you understand the process and pain points, develop a prototype using either a click-through demo or a storyboard showing screens.
Check and Finalize the Design: Gather the team to review the prototype and improve it iteratively until a final, approved design is complete. Then check grammar and spelling for all screens! Now you can begin developing.
My 2 Cents on design talks about my recent experience setting and checking in for an appointment. My tip is to check the user experience twice before beginning to develop the solution:
My 2 Cents on....
VUCA
Configuration Management
Securing the
Enterprise
