County of Fresno Case Study
When the IT shop’s senior manager retired, County leadership realized that problems had been hidden from sight for years. If these issues were not resolved quickly, the Department’s capabilities to serve the public would be severely crippled.
Overview
The County of Fresno’s Department of Social Service is a regional municipal entity in the United States with 2600 employees and an information technology (IT) support group of 48 personnel. The organization had been struggling to understand why technology projects have been severely mismanaged and why routine operational activities seem to require tremendous time and effort to complete. IT staff indicated they felt overworked and overwhelmed and the executive management team was unable to determine whether or not additional personnel need to be hired to help manage the increasing workload effectively.
Outcomes
After examining the IT group using the ITIL maturity model, the Project Strategy Consulting Group team noted that the front-end aspects of IT service management activities were predominantly non-existent within the organization. Such activities include such things as creating a viable organizational strategy with goals, objectives, and supporting critical success factors and key performance indicators; the governance of priorities and changes; establishing expectations for IT services; and defining desired work outcomes of the IT group. Indeed, as far as performing IT services, the IT group was dedicated, knowledgeable, and capable. Their primary challenges were constantly changing priorities and the continual reallocation of IT resources in both project-based and operational activities.
Summary
The Project Strategy Consulting Group worked closely with the executive leadership team of the organization to help them develop an overarching strategy which was able to be decomposed into criteria useable by the IT group to help develop a supporting IT strategy. Governance and reporting mechanisms were emplaced and clearly delineated IT service level management functions were established. Stakeholders are exceptionally pleased that the work processes for the IT group have stabilized and that priorities are known and resources allocated appropriately. IT staff are uniform in their support of the effort, indicating high levels of job satisfaction that had not previously been the case. Most significantly, no need for additional headcount in the IT shop was needed to achieve the desired outcomes.
