Case Study
Environmental Science and Research (ESR)
Project
IT Operations Processes and Procedures Manual
Background
The Institute for Environmental Science and Research Ltd (ESR) was assessing whether or not to outsource their IT Operations function. As part of this process, ESR identified the need to comprehensively document its IT Operations processes and procedures.
Comprehensive documentation was required so that ESR could verify their own IT Operations activities, and have a basis for quantifying the costs and bene!ts of having an in-house team versus outsourcing.
Problem
All existing documentation had been written over a seven-year period on an ad hoc basis. As a result, it was fragmented, incomplete and largely out of date. The IT Operations team is a small one, and no-one on the team had time to document current processes and procedures, much less keep them up to date.
Working as a team, the ESR IT Operations Manager and a Wordsworth business analyst spent over a week together, brainstorming and brain-dumping. Sessions lasted anywhere from two hours to a whole day each. From these sessions, the Wordsworth analyst was able to identify what needed to be documented for IT Operations. Not only did ESR require an IT Operations Processes and Procedures Manual, but also a number of other documents ranging from Policy to User and Third Party Documentation. The identification of these information gaps assisted the IT Operations Manager in planning and prioritising future internal projects.
The next step was structuring the information for the IT Operations Processes and Procedures Manual into a logical and useful order, and having a clear idea of the business requirements. The analyst took a modular approach to the structure, resulting in a manual that was broken down into eight mutually exclusive parts. This enabled the IT Operations Manager to prioritise development, and get buy-in from other business units by identifying who “owned” the information, and therefore who should pay for it.
After information requirements were identified and prioritised, a team of two Wordsworth writers began developing the prioritised documentation. The development process took approximately six weeks.
Solution
Result
The result was three completed parts of the IT Operations Processes and Procedures Manual:
Help Desk
Server Descriptions
Server Administration
The three parts were developed as separate documents with the view to being combined into one manual at a later date as required. The documentation captured all essential aspects of the required processes and procedures in each area.
Benefit
The key benefit for ESR has been verification and understanding of what actually happens within the IT Operations function. A significant amount of knowledge has now been captured through a process demanding a fraction of the IT Operations team’s time that would have been required had they used alternative means of achieving the same outputs.
“Wordsworth helped me achieve a great result in producing the !rst comprehensive set of “how to” documentation for IT Operations. The Wordsworth team assisted with the capture, development and definition of a valuable knowledge asset for ESR. The effectiveness of the Wordsworth team, supported by Wordsworth’s service delivery infrastructure, was outstanding.”
John Goodman - IT Operations Manager