A beautiful day in Charleston, SC
The second week of HDI Forums brought me back to this beautiful city on the east coast. The first week I joined the HDI Financial Forum as the met with Pete McGarahan to discuss managing Sev 1's and Sev 2's. The entire day was dedicated to learning more about how service level management is a key process for governing the daily management of Sev 1's and Sev 2's. Prioritization must be based on both Urgency and Business Impact. Sev 1's are critical to the business and require timely escalation both functionally and hierarchically. Dinner that evening was outstanding as we enjoyed a wonderful meal at Magnolia's followed by an evening at the Roof Top Pavilion. On our second day we met with Rae Ann Bruno to discuss how to manage the remote support staff. More companies are beginning to leverage home employees to augment their support staff. This provides increased flexibility in scheduling, access to a broader talent base, and a foundation for business continuity planning. The benefits do not come without the challenges of managing remote employees. Keeping them a part of the team and keeping them informed are just two challenges. The forum discussed a number of challenges and how to overcome them. In the afternoon, I had the pleasure of joining the HDI Government Forum and hearing Rae Ann talk about the other side of the remote story, the employees. The group discussed some of the challenges and solutions of support employees that are now remote and mobile. The wireless support demands are growing and are demands the support organization must be prepared to handle. While I was joining this forum, the HDI Financial Forum was meeting with Rich Hand to discuss the trends in the support industry. My final day with the HDI Financial Forum was spent with Joel Ramseyer. Joel led the group in discussing issues around on boarding of new employees. The scope was focused on the services offered by the support center to enable the company to efficiently on board new employees, as well as off boarding. During my second week in Charleston, I delivered a full day workshop on Knowledge-Centered Support for the HDI Retail Forum. There is a lot of interest in knowledge management and learning about the best practices in knowledge management was considered a big win for all in attendance. This one day workshop was a consolidation of material from the HDI Knowledge Management Foundations: KCS Principles three-day workshop. The focus was on understanding the core processes. The next day I joined the HDI Support Center Leadership Forum. After spending the previous day with Rae Ann Bruno in a more structured deliverable, this day was a facilitated roundtable discussion. The attendees were invited to propose discussion topics. Whoever proposed a topic then framed the discussion and what they wanted to get out of it. The team voted on the topics and the top two topics were "Knowledge Management" and "Executive/ BU Management Dashboards" We tackled the reporting topic first and everyone shared in what they are currently reporting. We quickly discovered there was no common thread and that this was a valuable learning experience. While ideas were shared and captured, the key learning was each company needed to report what was important to their senior management and that we could not create a template for all companies to follow. We also agreed that everyone would bring a copy of their executive report to the October meeting along with a summary of their business objectives. There will be a follow-up discussion at that meeting. The topic of knowledge management filled the room in the afternoon with questions, answers, ideas, and thoughts to contemplate. Some of the members shared their challenges and were given advice by others. I think this was the most valuable portion of the discussion, learning what others would do if they were faced with your challenge. Since the topic was knowledge management and something I am closely familiar with, I was able to share some ideas with the group based on industry best practices. I also challenged some of their thinking as they shared an overview of their current implementations. Knowledge management continues to be a topic of interest that the group wants to discuss in a future meeting. Leslie Cook did an outstanding job of bringing together 8 different HDI Forums over two weeks to the small coastal town of Charleston, SC. The weather was in the 90's and the humidity was high. All in all, a wonderful event in a beautiful city with outstanding weather. Nicely Done. Rick Joslin |
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