Kepner-Tregoe Training

When managing the IT department the amount of business risk varies by season, product transition cycle, business activity, and so on. Some periods of time will see more risk to the business than others. When managing high periods of business risk, a structured approach to operational activity can drive your contribution to business risk down.

• How long are you prepared to allow groups of people to “do their best” when handling incidents before requiring a scientific approach to the restoration of service? 1 hour? 3 hours? Several days?
• How long are you prepared to allow IT problems go without a root cause analysis before insisting on a scientific approach to the incident? Unsolved incidents represent business risk. 1 week, 2 weeks, 6 months?
• What happens next when repeated attempts failed? More of the same with more experts piling onto the situation? Or a structured approach to managing the issues?
•  When you get more people to work on it, how many fix attempts are you prepared to tolerate? At what point do you demand high quality thinking and a structured approach?

Ideally, you don’t want to expose your business to the unnecessary risk of poor restoration and resolution activities. By triggering and requiring good quality thought processes which can be taught, coached, and facilitated, you can drive business risk down and stability up.

By recognizing the essential elements of clear thinking yourself, you can audit what they are doing and how they are doing it. There are moments in the troubleshooting process which are critical to quality, and you can set coaching triggers on those moments:  What is the problem statement? Where is the evidence?  And by demonstrating leadership make a significant difference to your organization.

It is well-established that organizations that deploy the Kepner-Tregoe methodology in their incident and problem management functions achieve measurable results.  Many have shortened by about 40% the time-to-resolve cycle and additionally reduced roughly 40% of the time-on-task while problem solving, thereby reducing business risk.

The economic benefits are potentially huge.  If your organization can handle 40% more concerns with the same number of people, this either allows you to put more production through the same number of people, or deploy your talented staff on project work to achieve other business objectives. The institutional deployment of clear thinking through Kepner-Tregoe training brings high return on investment not just in the first year, but all the subsequent years.  You’ll have 40% more capacity to handle extra load.

And with well over fifty years of practical exposure in the business world, it’s no wonder that KT is considered the problem-solving method to employ.  For those running IT service management / ITIL shops, you’ll already know that KT is a cited best practice.  What are you waiting for?  Check out our course offerings developed in tandem with Kepner-Tregoe below and check out our currently scheduled KT courses here.