This is part 3 of a 3-part series exploring the implementation, refinement, and operation of an L2 service organization at BMC, and how you might find a similar path useful at your organization.

In part 1 and part 2 of this series, we discussed service levels in general, how service levels function at IT, and why we decided to pursue an L2 organization overhaul at BMC, as well as some of the benefits we realized. In this final installment, we will talk in more detail about our actual process and outcomes, as well as lessons we learned along the way.

For any IT organization, the desire to transcend from cost center to value provider is understandable. Digital disruption continues to create escalating customer demands, both internal and external, and IT must rise to the challenge without simultaneously driving up costs.

We knew that our success hinged on two criteria: people and processes. The resulting transformation evolved with those factors as determinants in every step.

• Staffing strategy—Creating the right talent pool wasn’t just about onboarding; it was about building a team of motivated people who were excited about new technology. Over a fiscal year, we cultivated a mix of interns (engineering graduates at the L1/L2 level) and experienced professionals, both of which could be converted to FT employees based on performance. Our existing internal talent were tapped for desired skills and abilities (speed and reliability were crucial), and their institutional knowledge helped bolster the resulting team: enthusiastic, enabled, and aligned to our vision.
• Transition strategy—a critical component of the L2 process was defining the organization’s scope of services. In our case, we designed with a focus around corrective, preventive, perfective, and adaptive activities. These included:
  • Creating and updating existing knowledge repositories
  • Ensuring that regular maintenance schedules were created and maintained for knowledge articles on various platforms
  • Enabling profile-specific application and instance access for efficient support delivery
• Assisted support—we implemented a period of shadow support between service levels to ensure processes were set up correctly, that monitoring was in place, that the ticketing system was ready to accommodate the increased volume of requests, and that a proper reporting cadence had been established.
• Go live—Once our checklist had been met, RACI playbooks and other tools were engrained, and a steady state was established, we were ready for launch.

Optimization in Action

With the L2 support organization live, workload optimization was our goal, knowing that every hour saved by L2 contributed to the efficiency of L3… and to our continued innovation capabilities. By segregating roles within operations and engineering, training needs became evident, and we were able to maximize retraining efforts and resources as well.

We also continued efforts across our career progression path with the mantra, “Move work down and move people up.” Essentially, this means that as we were able to push work to lower levels (even to L0—automation or retirement), we repurposed our employees enabling them to move up the ladder and into more challenging roles. , With these optimization efforts in place, we were also able to listen more closely to internal customers and identify opportunities for automation and innovation with new technology. Most importantly, proven performers are recognized across the org for L2 and L3 positions, and senior performers become the next generation of IT leaders.

Besides saving an incredible number of work hours for L3, the L2 model has exposed the teams to collaboration opportunities within IT and with other business units, offering them an overarching view of operational functions and allowing them to become the VOC (voice of the customer). With that connection, necessary improvements are noted early and can be responded to more efficiently—and identified needs can be translated into technology initiatives and innovations.

This emphasis on innovation and “going lean” has reached across every aspect of our organization and includes the use of automation and AI to do away with manual, repetitive tasks. With identified patterns and trends from service requests, we were able to implement chatbots to replace L1 calls in many cases, empowering users to help themselves and further proving IT as a value driver.

Finally, as part of our sales partnership, we have been able to take the role of Customer Zero with these new technologies, sharing our product experience and live demos with sales prospects. This benchmark has not only reinforced existing customer trust—it has also won new business for the company.

Cultural Accommodations

As anyone who has undertaken a large organizational change can attest, feelings around job security, career growth, and knowledge opportunities must be managed carefully. Conflict and chaos can arise when results aren’t in line with expectations, and we focused on diligent strategies to keep morale and productivity high. These include:

• Friday learnings—open houses to discuss doubts, opportunities, and prospects, along with achievement recognition
• Dedicated learnings—regular in-house training to foster continuous learning, and education assistance for employees to build their skills
• Growth prospects—efforts to ensure employees can pursue opportunities at the company outside their current responsibilities
• Employee advocate—employees partner to ensure teamwork and a culture of passion and learning

Some final thoughts: creating the dedicated L2 team at BMC made it clear that a focus on building capabilities (and keeping employees satisfied) is critical to success. In our three-year experience, we have also gained constructive customer insights that have led to successful implementation of several cognitive tools, and have further cemented existing customer relationships while gaining new prospects. DevOps provides additional opportunities for skill enhancement and team building.

If you have followed this entire blog series—thank you. Your interest in pursuing a profound shift in the way IT can provide service is important, and we hope that some of what we have shared here will be helpful to you in your journey.

To learn more about creating an effective L2 organization at your company, including our benchmarks and outcomes, please read the white paper about BMC’s journey.

This is part 2 of a 3-part series exploring the implementation, refinement, and operation of an L2 service organization at BMC, and how you might find a similar path useful at your organization.

As we discussed in part 1, a critical concept to adopt for operational excellence in IT is one of optimized roles for optimal outcomes. Specifically (and in the context of this blog), regularly using the  skilled employees of a development organization for moderate support requirements is neither efficient nor effective in the long run. We needed better definition between our service levels, and targeted outcomes for their roles.

As we looked to create an L2 support organization that would be a dedicated support arm of the BMC IT organization, our goals were fairly typical considerations for most IT organizations. We wanted to:

• Eliminate organizational overlaps and redundancies, and establish better alignment with the business
• Increase accountability across IT
• Deliver incremental customer value in business-defined windows

We began by further defining and refining our support levels and their functions. We realized that for an L2 organization to flourish, it needed to not only deliver support, but also act as a customer connection, allowing us to operationalize innovations.

Our existing service organization includes:

L1: Service Desk – delivers excellent frontline support to all of BMC

L2: Complex Support Arm – works under corrective, preventive, perfective, and adaptive approaches

L2: End-user client service – provisions and supports end-user devices and technology

NOC: Minimizes outage time and facilitates crisis calls for faster resolution

A word of caution – for any strategic move to be successful, people and processes must be considered thoughtfully. Implementation can’t be rushed—in fact, it took us approximately six months to build a functioning L2 organization across just one platform. Managing the combination of recruiting and onboarding the correct mix of talent, defining the scope of the organization, building processes around the transition management, and designing and incorporating the necessary measurements and feedback mechanisms (RACI playbooks, checklists, etc.) was a considerable task, and one that took deliberation, cooperation, and time.

Within the first year, we had demonstrably increased efficiency (including 20,660 hours saved by L1 and 14,380 hours saved by L2), lowered operational costs, and fully leveraged the ITSM/ITIL features that improved our work processes and outcomes. Now in our fourth fiscal year, we have increased the segregation of work between the L2 and L3 support levels from 11% to 29% , helping reduce context-switching for our L3 engineers and allowing them to focus on project work rather than operational issues. We will share more details about these outcomes and how we achieved them in part 3 of this blog series.

Why Any IT Organization Should Consider This Journey

If you are reading this blog series, chances are you’ve thought about ways to improve the service levels of your organization, as well as its partnership with the business. And if that’s the case, you already inherently understand how your org and your enterprise can benefit from those changes. As we anticipated our own transformation, we kept these guiding principles in mind:

• Focused operations—our teams would be better able to deliver positive outcomes, including meeting SLAs, if their work was appropriate to their skill level and their energies were spent effectively. These benefits would carry across the org and throughout the business.
• Efficiencies—streamlining responsibilities, reducing operational costs, and investing skilled staff in valuable projects transforms user experiences and transforms IT into a value driver.
• New services and processes—when roles are defined and workflow is structured, opportunities to invest in innovative practices and technologies become clearer and adopting them becomes part of the organization’s overall transformation.
• Cultural improvements—as a team comes together to define and assume new roles and responsibilities, collaboration and continuous learning are a necessary part of the process. The rigor requires openness to digital disruption and new technology, and it creates opportunity for career growth and skill expansion, benefiting staff at any level of experience.

This last point can’t be overstated—to invigorate your teams and align their passions, they must become advocates of the process and end goals. Make sure everyone keeps the benefits in sight as they take on new tasks,  and continue to provide opportunities for training and education to everyone. We will discuss more about onboarding new staff, keeping existing staff, and ensuring successful career paths more in our last installment.

Up Next: For more information about the specific processes and steps we took to create our L2 organization, and to learn more about our outcomes, read the last post in the series, or read the white paper for the full story now.

BMC Case Study: Increasing IT Efficiency with a Level-2 Support Organization

The evolution of the enterprise IT support organization mirrors that of the impact of technology on the world at large—as innovation drives demand, organizations must scale to both meet those requirements and anticipate further disruption.

The role of IT service (also referred to as technical support, help desk, or service desk, with only slight differences in interpretation) is fairly straightforward: to help users with technology products or services. The IT support organization often rides a line between technical expertise and practical application—specifically, customer service.

The levels of service provided, though, are a source of ongoing conversation and change in most IT organizations today as we seek to reduce costs, improve efficiencies, and deliver an outstanding customer experience. Whereas one might assume a higher level of support would lead to greater user satisfaction, that isn’t necessarily the case—in fact, effective self-help or L0 support, known as being able to solve a problem without outside assistance (and the related burdens of time spent, communication issues, and other complications) is frequently considered the mark of a truly user-friendly service organization. L1 support is essentially a feedback channel, with support agents trained to manage relatively simple issues with previously defined knowledge and call scripts. L3 support, designed to be highly effective and resource-intensive, should be reserved for complex issues that require investigation and often problem duplication.

So where does L2 support come in, and how can it optimize its function as a critical component to service delivery and a value-driver rather than just a cost center?

As companies and departments change to accommodate the innovations and advancements necessary to remain competitive, a balance between engineering and operations that accommodates budget and resource restrictions is mandatory. With the right steps in place, an L2 organization that is enabled with the latest technologies, empowered with digital capabilities, and structured to ensure agility and growth is poised to succeed.

BMC IT took this journey, and in this short blog series, we will describe the priorities we determined for our L2 organization, the process we undertook (including the lessons we learned along the way), and our outcomes. We hope it will serve as an inspiration to your organization as you look to galvanize your service delivery, please your customers, and deliver operational excellence.

Where We Were

When enterprises view IT as a cost center that addresses issues reactively (yet with the expectation that the org will afford innovative tools within their tight budget), IT often reacts by diverting higher-skilled employees into valuable innovation projects without up leveling L1 service providers. With teams segregated under operations and engineering verticals, development and engineering teams are often pulled in to assist overburdened L1. When BMC realized the resulting inefficiencies (and team frustrations), we moved toward creating a dedicated L2 support organization as a part of the core operational group, NOC, and service desk.

Our priorities were clear:

• We wanted to better leverage our skilled employees and existing resources including the processes and technology that our organization relies upon.
• We needed to deliver better service experiences, including the latest technology capabilities for automation and cognitive, to increase customer satisfaction and demonstrate efficiency.
• We planned to ensure better business/IT alignment for reliable SLA outcomes and focused deliverables.

We are now in year four of our journey, and as you will learn in the next two installments, our carefully planned and executed strategy has allowed us to run the business efficiently while reinventing how we deliver our services.

Up Next: To learn more about what prompted BMC IT to take on this challenging yet rewarding process and how your organization might benefit from the same exercise, read the next post in the series, or read the white paper for the full story now.