We are all living in completely unknown times. The past couple of months has seen so many changes to the way that we work, rest and play; none of which we would have realised would have such profound effects on us all. For people in services, it has been extreme beyond all measure explains Martin Summerhayes...

 

Speaking to customers and partners, it is clear that many do not know why they are feeling the way they are. Some are feeling angry. Many are feeling frightened.  A few are in denial about the current situation. A small minority are feeling that this is only a short term situation and everything will return to “normal”, whatever, they may describe as normal.

 

Managing the mobile workforce during covid-19

It reminded me of the “Change Curve of Loss” that I was taught a number of years ago and have used on many change programmes. So, what is this curve? The theory is based on a model originally developed in the 1960s by a psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, to explain the grieving process. Since then it has been widely developed as a method of helping people understand their reactions to significant change or upheaval.

It is such an extraordinary time; that I took some time to refresh myself on what the model describes. The model, in its simplest form, has four stages associated with it. These stages are:-

• Stage 1 – Immobilisation and Denial
• Stage 2 – Anger and Bargaining
• Stage 3 – Depression and Testing
• Stage 4 - Acceptance

Note: Since writing this article, the HBR – Harvard Business school, has published an article on the same subject, details of which can be found at the end of this article.

So, what do these stages describe? Before we jump in. let me ask you to spend a moment, just a moment, to write down on a piece of paper, the word or phrase of where you are feeling in the current situation. It will help guide you through the detail, for you to know where you are in the “change curve”. Please be aware, there is no right or wrong answers to any of this and this is only a guide. Let, me explain the stages and the details behind them:-

Prior to Stage 1 - Stability

Prior to the onset of Covid-19, we were working, living and experiencing relative stability in our lives, our work and our social surroundings. Yes, there were challenges, but for many; we were living in relative stability. Then came the announcements of virus infections; illnesses; deaths; closure of services; restrictions on movement; social distancing and finally; lockdown in your own home. Within a relatively short timescale, a bow wave of significant changes and upheavals hit us all, all effecting us in different ways. How these have affected us, then follows the four stages….

 

Stage 1 – Immobilisation and Denial

This is the “rabbit in the head lights moment” where we go “OMG” what on earth is happening. This stage occurred just prior to and at the point of the lockdown, here in the UK.

• Immobilisation: We suddenly feel immobilised. Full of fear. Confusion sets in. We feel overwhelmed with the news and the social media “storm” that ensued.
• Denial: Next comes denial. We saw that as soon as the government announced restrictions, with some people ignoring them and continuing to meet up and get together. “Its’ not going to happen to me Gov”, was the argument.

 

Stage 2 – Anger and Bargaining

This is where another aspect of our view of the world kicks in. We kick back, feeling anger at the situation. Our “fight or flight” base feelings kick in at this stage.

• Anger: Anger at the loss of freedom. Anger at the loss of liberties, the freedoms we all had. “Why me” is often cited at this point. Often, the anger can be expressed in physical means, striking out, or trying to discharge the emotional turmoil.
• Bargaining: Strangely enough, next comes bargaining. This is where you try to minimise the impact. “If only I do this or that, then the situation will not affect me.”

 

Stage 3 – Depression and Testing

This is the lowest ebb in the change curve. Being aware you are in this stage, is a good starting point to trying to understand, cope and deal with it. None of us are professionals in mental health, so if you feel that you are not coping well, please reach our to friends, colleagues, loved ones, family, or contact the NHS for support.

• Depression: If the change curve of loss is followed in sequence, then this is the next phase. This is where the sense of loss and frustration turn inwards. “Why me” is often spoken of. If you considered before this situation, 1 in 5, yes, 1 in 5 adults in the UK had experienced some form of stress and potential depressive episode, during their working life; you can only imagine the numbers that may enter this stage over the next few weeks.
• Testing: This is where you start to lift out from the depressive phase. It is where you start to test the “new norm”. Where you begin to try new alternatives. Perhaps it is walking. Perhaps it is exercise. Perhaps it is Skyping a friend or relative.

 

Stage 4 - Acceptance

This is where you feel that normality is returning. It is not going to be the same normal as what there was before; but we have a fantastic ability to adapt.

• Acceptance: This final stage is where you respond to the change realistically.
  
  

That acceptance of the new norm is, in fact “normal”.

It is important to recognise that we are all going through this “Change Curve of Loss” over the coming weeks.

Our customers. Our partners. Our field engineers. 

How quickly we go though this change curve and to the depth of curve cycle, is going to be personal for each one of us. How people recognise and understand that it is perfectly natural to feel this way; how well individuals respond to the changes as they occur and how quickly they move into the acceptance phase, is all personal. I would encourage us all to take the time to be thoughtful of others. To take a moment of kindness and reflection in this uncertain time. We will come out of this period of uncertainty. We are, after all, human.

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Further Reading:

• Read more articles by Martin Summerhayes @ www.fieldservicenews.com/martin+summerhayes
• Read more articles on health, safety and wellbeing in service @ www.fieldservicenews.com/healthsafety
• Read more articles on managing the mobile workforce @ www.fieldservicenews.com/managing-the-mobile-workforce
• The HBR article referenced in the article can be found @ hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-grief
• Read NHS Support on mental health @ www.nhs.uk/using-the-nhs/nhs-services/mental-health-services/ 

Martin Summerhayes offers a take on the five P's business acronym that could help service directors when they switch their infrastructure back on.

Before you jump to a different conclusion, the five P’s in the title is not the normal phrase that many of you know (poor planning, promotes poor performance!).

As we are all living, and possibly working, in the current restrictions, it seems strange to be thinking of what comes as we start to transition out of these times: locked down, social distancing, restricted movement and travel, etc. Discussing with colleagues and organisations, many are focused on the immediate business needs; furloughing staff; pairing back on the services that are delivered; are just a couple of activities they are focused on. So why think about when we start to exit?

Field Service Management operating in lockdown

Well, to think of exit, we need to consider how we entered the situation. The UK was put into lockdown on Monday 23rd March in an unprecedented step to attempt to limit the spread of coronavirus (Lockdowns and restrictions were also applied across Europe and the rest of the world. If your service business relies on global networks, then this is even more of a complex situation). During the lead up to that day, many companies, organisations, and services had carried on much as normal. Shops; retail outlets; restaurants; public houses; garden centres; sports facilities; the list could go on and on; but most were trading and operating as normal. Almost overnight, the restrictions meant that many places had to close with immediate effect.

Here comes some (but by no means all) of the potential issues. For ease, I have broken them down into three categories.

Product Issues

Having worked in IT Services for many years and been involved in the support of both new, as well as legacy solutions, two big issues with regard to the products spring to mind.

The first is, for many of the organisations that were shut down, how was their IT systems shut down? I would imagine that most, if not all, was shut down as the there were no timescales provided for the lockdown. Were these servers, storage, network devices, etc, shut down properly or were they just turned off? The implications for Windows and Unix environments when not shut down properly, can often mean that you can end up with problems when you try to reboot them (corrupt databases, applications and operating systems spring to mind). In addition, prior to being shut down, did they take a full backup, rather than an incremental one? I have seen situations where restoring incremental backups was a complete nightmare, as the backups were not all stored.

Secondly, as many of us know, when you have a legacy product – say a server – over time the component boards become brittle. The solder joints and the multi-layer component boards get impacted by the constant heat. I have often seen that when an IT product is turned off – either in a planned or unplanned manner – quite often, it fails to start back up. The component boards break down and the solder joints fail.

Repair & Logistic Issues

For many IT service organisations; and I would imagine it is similar in other technology service markets; there is a finite spare, and repair loop. One of the biggest costs of after-sales service, is the provision of spare parts available to service the needs of customers. Both in terms of “good” spares, those spares that are ready to be used to resolve issues, as well as “bad” spares, that have been swapped out of a product to resolve the issue.

"The level of service requests has dropped dramatically as the market sectors, organisations and clients that are served are closed..."

This repair & logistics loop is an almost infinitive loop. Optimising this loop means only having the minimum stock of spares to meet the repair and logistics loop UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES (I have used CAPITALS as this is important!). This normal logistics and repair loop can be between fifteen to twenty days on average. The lockdown has effectively frozen this loop. Where are your spares? In the repair loop at a depot waiting to be shipped back to a repairer? At a repairer awaiting repair? Or at a repairer, repaired, waiting to be shipped back as “good” stock into your stock loop? You might even have been in the process of servicing requests, in which case the spares were in forward stocking locations awaiting call off against new service requests?

Service Staff Issues

For many organisations, the level of service requests has dropped dramatically as the market sectors, organisations and clients that are served are closed. This means that many service technicians, technical couriers and service engineers have been furloughed; retaining the staff, but at the same time, reducing the staff cost overheads verses the services revenues received from clients.

This is where the first set of P’s comes in. “Precise Planning Pre-empts”.

We are going to come out of this at some point. However, it is not going to be a mass switch on of services; mass opening of markets and outlets. Think of a giant “Turn On” switch being pulled. Rather, it is going to be phased approach, something that the UK government is still defining. Every indication is that it will be a phased relaxation of restrictions across industries, sectors and services (I imagine that this is similar across different countries and governments as well).

If you take into account the issues above and the likelihood of the impact of IT failures, the level of service requests and the ability to be able to meet those requests when the services reopen is going to be a huge challenge. I can easily see an increase of service failures of more than 20% increase of normal failure volumes.

This is where elements of “scenario planning” and an element of “game theory” comes into their own. The “Precise Planning” element. You can take a set of scenarios to then precisely plan the impacts. This evolves around asking a series of open ended questions and describing in detail the responses and impacts.

For example: One of your customers that has a mixed legacy IT estate that is distributed across a number of outlets around the country.

• Do you know what is the makeup of the IT products across the customers estate? By outlet? By size of outlet? By type of outlet?
• As it is a mixed legacy estate, do you have failure rates by product for both new, as well as legacy products? Do you have data based on previous peeks of service (say Christmas, holiday peeks, etc)? Or have you had service outages in the past (say due to a power failure) and have details of the resultant failure rate of the products?

"Have you spoken to your customer and asked them what their expectations are?..."

• Have you engaged your most senior support and service engineers to review the estate, failure rates and the likely impact of “turn off v’s shut down” and provided their best judgement of the impacts? Their knowledge and insight are crucial.
• Did the customer instruct its outlet staff to correctly shut down the IT estate, or were they told to just “turn it off”? What is the impact of doing this? Do the support engineers believe that there will be a need to rebuild or restore servers? Replace hard disks that crashed and were destroyed? Do the field engineers have the ability to restore backups? Reinstall applications, databases and operating systems? Or can this be done remotely? If remotely, is there sufficient staff to do this?
• If the customer is allowed to open, will they want to open all of the outlets in one go? Will they phase this? Are there more significant outlets that they will want to open first? Which are the most important? The biggest? The most revenue generator?
• Have you spoken with your customer and asked them what their expectations are?
• Where is the current spares stock? At repairers? In transit? Lost? Based on collating details by product and part, from the questions above, can you proximate the level of stock that you are going to need? This is going to have to be a “rough order of magnitude” as this situation has never occurred before. Will you need to supplement spares stock? How? Do you have whole units in storage that you could break down? Do you have technical support stock that you could use? Does the customer have spare stock?
• From a field service engineer perspective, have you got the skills and technical knowledge to be able to deal with the surge in volume? How can you help the engineers be able to deal with the volume of service requests? Will you have to have extended service hours? Weekend working?
• From a health & safety perspective, it could be that social distancing is still going to be in force. How will the field engineers deal with this? What level of PPE will they need to have to be able to visit the outlet? Will they be mandated to wear masks and gloves? Will they be asked to sanitise their equipment and the outside of the spares boxes? How will you get the PPE to the engineers? Will they be expected to replace / renew PPE at each customer site or only at different customers? Who will purchase the ongoing PPE that the engineers will need? You? Will they be expected to purchase it themselves?
• Note: this list is not exhaustive.

The final part of the 5 P’s is, “Proactive Performance”? Have you captured all of the impacts, potential outcomes and put it into a plan? A resource profile? A spares planning spreadsheet? Have you shared this across your organisation teams? With the customer?

Then multiple scenario this by the many customers you serve and you can see why acting on these scenarios now will support, Proactive Performance. You will need to explore at least 5 different customers and scenarios to start to see a trend and start to see the common elements that you need to work on now.

How many service organisations are taking the time to theorise and plan along these lines during this time? Are you living the scenarios now? Are you planning along these lines? Please do share how you are planning for the future. The service community is living in completely unknown times and it is only through being open and sharing experiences, successes, as well as failures, that we can be successful.

The following quote made me smile:

“If plan A doesn’t work, the alphabet has 25 more letters – 204 if you’re in Japan.” ― Claire Cook, writer and motivational speaker

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Further Reading: 

• Read more from Martin Summerhayes @ www.fieldservicenews.com/martinsummerhayes
• Read more Covid-19 related content @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/covid19
• Follow Martin Summerhayes on LinkedIn here.

The world of IT Services has evolved on many an occasion, however, right now it needs to prepare for another iteration of the new normal for it to continue to thrive writes Martin Summerhayes...

IT services have come a long way over the past 20 years or so. From the heyday of the hardware manufacturers, rolling out ever more sophisticated technology solutions; with faster compute power, larger storage capabilities and faster network performance; the pace of change seemed to be faster and faster.

 

Long Tail Service Support

Then the average sales lifecycle for the hardware platforms was a couple of years and services had to keep up with the ever-expanding portfolio of solutions. This meant a longer and longer list of products that had to be supported and maintained. What is known as “the long tail”.  

I was part of the long tail of support. When I first started as a field engineer for Hewlett-Packard (HP); HP had just released its first HP LaserJet printer, the 2686A and shortly afterwards its first PC. Within five years, the market had exploded and there were hundreds of different models. Combined, with the mini computers, servers, storage and network products being produced; it felt as if it was a quarterly tech refresh and learning hamster wheel.

The implications for many services companies meant, having to train the workforce on an ever expanding list of products, servicing more and more options and then having to keep, maintain and supply more and more variants of spare parts. As HP moved into the multi-vendor field of service deliver, this became even more complex. 

"As the consolidation of software operating system platforms has accelerated, so has the consolidation and merger of major hardware and solution platforms as well..."

At the same time as hardware manufacturers grew their product portfolio, the operating systems that were used to manage these diverse hardware platforms started to consolidate. From fifteen or more different types of operating system, over the past fifteen years, we have seen the standard platforms evolve to be either Microsoft or Linux/Unix based for the B2B market. For the B2C market Googles Android and Apples IOS operating systems are the two predominant variants.

As the consolidation of software operating system platforms has accelerated, so has the consolidation and merger of major hardware and solution platforms as well. What was once a diverse and jumbled array of solution providers; from an IT perspective; consolidation has meant standardisation, supply chain simplification and “more bang for the buck” that companies pay for their IT.

However, “the long tail” persists. Even today, with 70%, yep 70% of IT spend just keeping the “lights on”.

Only 20-30% of IT budgets are spent on new solutions, and the vast majority of that spend is now on software, not hardware. If you look at the hardware sale of servers, storage and networking solutions across Europe over the last few years; we have seen a steady decline in growth and a flattening of sales. It is almost at a point where customers are no longer purchasing hardware at all.

This might be an oversimplification, but the market figures do seem to indicate that the market is flat or even declining (If you are in hardware sales, and disagree, please feel free to say so in the comments below).

 

The Origins of Everything as a Service

This hardware sales decline has been driven largely by the “as a Service” models, starting with “IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service”, where customers could purchase raw hardware compute poser – be it servers, storage or network capabilities; expanding into “Software as a Service” – which has had a dramatic and completely disruptive effect on the traditional software annuity licence model and now a new variant called “Platform as a Service (PaaS)”, which wraps up IaaS, SaaS and extends it across the complete enterprise of services and IT organisation is offering to its business and end user base.

If you check out companies such as Salesforce.Com or ServiceNow, they are moving rapidly away from their heartlands of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for Salesforce.Com which tracks the sales engagement and onboarding of new customers and IT Service Management (ITSM) on a Service Desk (for ServiceNow) where you track end-user incidents, problems and issues that they face; into a eco system called “Platform as a Service”.

This means that ServiceNow is launching solutions for HR; for Finance, for Marketing, for example. Salesforce.com is offering the ability for apps developers to develop applications, standing on top of the salesforce platform, that also expand into HR, finance and Marketing. (As a foot note, I can see a major battle developing between these two companies over the next few years).

Why are these companies doing this?

As markets exist, companies expand to meet those markets. The number one in the CRM and ITSM markets, are respectively, Salesforce and ServiceNow. To be able to continue to grow, provide shareholder value and appear to be leading edge, the local answer is to expand their market presence into similar market landscapes – hence – moving out from their core business models into parallel markets.

 

Time for Evolution in IT Service Design

So from an IT service model perspective, we need to adapt and change as well.

Too many of the service models that exist today are silo’d; focused on vertical optimisation of an element of the service lifecycle – Service Desk, Diagnosis, field service (massively silo’d), forward and return logistics and finally repair. This, I would contend, runs the risk of a continued race to bottom line, with lower and lower costs, less margin and an ever decreasing customer experience. Oh, and before you ask, when you get to the bottom, there is nowhere else to go!

"We need to think more of the lifecycle and value stream across IT..."

Whilst customers are looking to maximise the value of their IT estate, they also want to further standardise and modernise the services that they offer to their businesses. They are looking at IT service organisations and the value that they can bring in terms of supporting and transforming their IT services; bringing more of the adaptive model that we see in the consumer world; hand held devices, mobility, ease of use and adaptive adaption to rapidly changing business needs.

This needs a new set of thinking about how services need to be positioned. We need to think more of the lifecycle and value stream across IT.

I like to think that services will continue to develop and evolve and a new ecosystem will emerge where organisations strategically partner with one another; leveraging others strengths, as well as the clients they serve; to bring better value to the IT customers. This is going to need some new thinking, maybe, from learning from the software services world. I don’t have all of the answers, but have experience a number of these cyclical changes, so understand the changes companies need to make.

If you think that it is just “business as usual” and we as a community do not need to adapt, feel free to challenge.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

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Further Reading:

• Read more articles written by Martin @ www.fieldservicenews.com/martin-summerhayes
• Read more articles on IT Services @ /www.fieldservicenews.com/ITSM
• Find out about Martin's work with MDB Consulting @ www.mdbsc.co.uk
• Follow Martin on Twitter @ twitter.com/martinsummerhay
• Connect with Martin on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/in/martinsummerhayes/

Development from novice to expert is something we need to go through multiple times in our working career. So, why do organisations still struggle with refining this process and what still needs to be done? Martin Summerhayes writes...

 

 

Novice?

Let me ask you a question, when were you a novice? 

Likely as not, you are currently an expert in your field of service, having worked across a number of companies and business sectors over a number of years. Your experience and maturity mean, that you may be considered an expert in your field. Whether it is supply chain, reverse logistics, inventory management, field planning, field service, engineering, remote support, or repair operations. You get the picture.

The spectrum of support areas that make up an end-2-end service model are extensive and require people to understand both the individual complexity, as well as how that whole service lifecycle fits together.

How often are people “pigeon holed” into a particular part of the service landscape, gaining experience in one area, but not understanding any other?

So, back to the question, when were you a novice?

For me, it was last Autumn, when I started a new role in a new company. Despite the many years of experience that I have in the services business; taking on a new role, in a new company, brings the feeling of being a novice and having to learn from scratch, numerous things. How the company operates; what in reality my role is verses the role that is advertised and interviewed for. The clients

and partners that I have to engage with and serve. All of these aspects take time to master and I challenge anyone to say that they are fully productive and adding value within a short period of time. Even someone with the length of experience that I have, it takes weeks and possibly months to fully embrace the diverse aspects of the role that you take on.

 

"I really do not like the word apprentice due to the meaning that it has..."

 

So, let’s turn to one of the biggest challenges in the services business today that is directly tied into being a novice and getting novices into the service world.

I have played slightly with words here, as most people would call a novice, an “Apprentice”. However, I really do not like the word apprentice due to the meaning that it has. If you check the google dictionary, the word apprentice means,  “a person who is learning a trade from a skilled employer, having agreed to work for a fixed period at low wages.” Now, I know that is what the definition means, but for those who take on these roles, it can feel negative in its meaning.

I recall starting out as a field engineer, many years ago. Yes, the salary was low compared to the other engineers in the team I was joining. However, they were all more experienced than me and had been trained on a broad range of technology. Me, I was straight out of college; had masses of theory; but no practical experience at all. I was paired up with a senior field engineer for my first month and together we travelled across greater London, resolving numerous service issues. He was kind, thoughtful and helpful in explaining both the problems and how to resolve them. He taught me the technical aspects of field service, but more importantly, he taught me how to engage with customers. How to ensure that they felt that they were important. That their issue was managed well and resolved.

More important that both of those aspects were the end-2-end views my supervisor gave me. He organised for me to sit with the field despatch team, seeing how field calls were organised. He made sure I spent time with the parts storeman, so I understood the importance of returning parts in a timely manner and finally, he let me sit with the bench repair team, so I could learn some of the techniques of component repair.

"It gave the novices the freedom to experience as many different roles and aspects of service as possible..."

That early set of experiences has always stayed with me. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to mentor and support a group of novices as they started their service careers after leaving education.

I organised their joining based on a double rotation basis. A week spent with each key aspect of the services lifecycle within the business (a lot more complex than what I had experienced when I started). This meant, starting with Service Introduction, with the technical take on of new services. Then to Remote Scheduling and Partner Support. Then into the field, across the multiple different field models – High End Systems, Break Fix, Volume Repair, and Deskside. Then into Warehousing, Logistics and Repair. This was to give them a small understanding of the services model we operated.

From there, the novices were then rotated through each department again on a four to six-week rotation. The idea being that they would deliver a specific project during that time to aid that part of the business. Finally, there was 360-degree feedback from the department heads and the novices themselves as to which department that would like to be based in for the next year. At the end of the two-year programme, they were allowed to take up permanent roles or apply for other roles in other parts of the business.

Was this approach affective? Yes, highly.

It gave the novices the freedom to experience as many different roles and aspects of service as possible. It enabled them to understand the board picture and how services fitted together. It also allowed us to understand their strengths and where they worked well and for them to understand whether service and a particular role was right for them. Some stayed and some left, but every one of the novices appreciated the effort we had put into the scheme.

So, what scheme do you have? Do you even have novices in your business?

It does not matter whether your business is massive or small, there is always an opportunity to bring on new people. Let me give you two current examples.

 

"I challenge everyone in the services world to embrace the idea of novices..."

 

The client I am working with at the moment has 40,000 employees. Yep, 40,000, across the whole of the UK. They have a novice programme and operate very similarly to what I ran previously. The cohorts are grouped together in groups, to give them peer support and so that they do not feel isolated. They do a four week rotation and work on projects designed and supported by the departments they are in. They get regular support, feedback and guidance. Each novice has a mentor that they can work with. Speaking to a number of them recently, they felt positively engaged, valued and part of the organisation.

For my own organisation, which is much smaller, we too are looking at bringing on a couple of novices this year. To support the expansion of the business and also to provide resilience by cross training them in a couple of technical areas.

So, I challenge everyone in the services world to embrace the idea of novices. Bring them into your organisations, but more importantly, have a plan and a roadmap of what they are going to do. Don’t just dump them into an area of your business and expect them to thrive, proposer and grow. Look after them and in the medium term, they will grow into roles that will add significant value to your business.

I leave with the following quote:

“In most every business, you learn by doing. The apprenticeship model is much more effective than the classroom for cultivating entrepreneurs.”

Andrew Yang (American entrepreneur, philanthropist, author, lawyer, and former candidate for President of the United States in the 2020 election

Martin Summerhayes suggests taking stock of what we have now and developing soft skills can influence our future success.

Regular Field Service News contributor Martin Summerhayes suggests the language used in service is too negative and the sector should re-frame its vocabulary as we go into 2020.

As a sector we are drowning in data. Filtering it all down to something useful is growing more and more difficult. Here, Martin Summerhayes, outlines a strategy that will keep your head above the ones and zeros.

Martin Summerhayes takes us back to the future as he looks at field service past, present and future...

In an industry that moves as rapidly as field service often does, it is important to have a firm grasp on the nuanced skill of change management. However, getting to the heart of what makes change work lies in an all too familiar acronym writes Martin Summerhayes...