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The Service Delivery Conundrum

Ensuring the same perceptibility to all stakeholders creates empathy, a key to successful service delivery

Jul 07, 2023
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Mathew lives in central Indonesia. After years of services, he could no longer take the stress of his highly rewarding job as an Information System Delivery Manager for a French company, 6-7 hours behind on time-zone. He felt he was sandwiched between his customers and the stakeholders - the suppliers, IT staff of the company and business partners. While he has got support across the world - from Argentina to Azerbaijan, the priorities are often different. Work culture varies. People move on. While the show must go on and the customers in distress need their service there and then, Mathew may not be able to get an answer from his French colleagues who by law are prohibited from receiving emails after working hours. When the French IT staff leave office, they must leave their work as well. So, it will have to be the support staff from Argentina, almost half a day behind Mathew. Meanwhile, Mathew's weekend is spoiled. His social life ruined.

With ballooning complexities of projects coupled with lack of skilled personnel has made on-time and within budget service delivery a major challenge. The impediments are many. Skills gap, shortage of labour and limited capacity to deal with high volume of customers are perhaps challenges management need to address by competing in the market to recruit the best and match the demand. However, recruiting the best doesn’t address the real issues unless they can be retained and armed with processes that make their life easier to deliver the services. Organizations need to provide

a complete picture of the status of the projects at all time,
an ability to choose the most appropriate and available resources as team member,
a platform for team members to communicate with each other effectively

However, often organizations fail to create an environment where customers and all stakeholders are on the same page such that they can appreciate the challenges and difficulties faced by all parties. Even faced with resource limitation and other constraints, an environment that help in developing empathy for each other, the Service Delivery Managers would be able to steer the project to a successful completion. Often state-of-the-art technologies miss out on the human aspects that can be leveraged by bringing about overall transparency and aligning of individual goals.