We all know that having a company be successful is a team effort. Everyone needs to work together to make sure that everything runs smoothly, and things work the best when we all know where our edges are on our roles and we are empowered to become experts in our fields. While TruMethods has a lot of content that talks about service delivery roles and we facilitate discussions about how the roles work together, how can myITprocess help with that communication?
Communication between the roles in our myITprocess software is actually critical to getting maximum efficiency in the system. Without it, oftentimes TAM (Technology Alignment Manager) reviews are left uncompleted, or vCIO (Virtual Chief Information Officer) presentations do not have the backup of the review process to provide context for recommendations. Making sure things are completed in the right order requires process and organizational discipline that many often don’t even realize exists.
A lot of this process starts with understanding what the TAM and vCIO really need to do, and what the heart of their roles really are. In a perfect world, everything starts with the TAM; they gather enough information that the vCIO will have a clear technical picture of what is going on with a particular question, but not so much that it reads like a technical manual. The TAM is the first filter towards getting the information in a business context to the customer. Additionally, the vCIO usually is not super technical, so the TAM needs to translate their findings a bit so that the vCIO can understand it fully and present it well to decision makers. It also helps if this information is conveyed across clients in generally the same way, and the Technical Analysis answers the things that are most important for your company way, so everyone needs to agree on what that means. The TAM is also super important because they see all aspects of the client’s technical environment, not just the project team’s view or the helpdesk view or the centralized services view, and they can use that unique perspective to their advantage. That’s much more than just answering yes/no questions!
So then what is the next step? The vCIO needs to build their presentation for a client on the information provided by the TAM. Do they have enough technical knowledge and perspective to do that? Can they verbalize what it means for a client to not have one of their best practices and provide a solution to it? The vCIO needs to have all of the specifics of the review in their head, but should broaden things out for the recommendations on the roadmap in order to show value in the client; getting in the weeds with clients in the end really helps no one. With that being said, the approach as a vCIO is going to be a bit different if they are talking to a CTO as opposed to a CEO.
From an organizational perspective, it’s also important to have standardized answers to the things that mostly only TAMs and vCIOs see in myITprocess. The ‘Why are we asking’ and ‘How to’ fields should be filled out well, and clearly. The former especially isn’t just for your customers, the TAM should know how what they are doing goes into the process as a whole, and they should be able to communicate that to your client. The How-to area also has the capacity to define repeatable processes in the case of something being out of alignment.
myITprocess is helping with other types of communication as well. As many know, myITprocess integrates with Autotask and Connectwise, so TAMs and vCIOs can create tickets directly in their systems from the review process. And while it isn’t exactly an integration, it is also possible to copy the link of any given recommendation to the clipboard and paste it into a ticket, email, or anywhere else so a user can get directly to the recommendation referenced quickly. Additionally, in the last 6 months we have launched our integration with IT Glue; members can now create recommendations directly from configurations on client roadmaps, and they can also attach configurations to specific questions in client templates. We are continuing to expand this integration, but it has already shown to be invaluable to the members that use it. Even our 2fa now works with your Gmail address to make the login process easier. Finally, our team is continuing to work on the reporting API for the system so information can be pulled into things like Gainsight.
Communication in any business is critical, but sometimes in more technical businesses like ours it is easy to push those ‘softer’ skills aside. By keeping discipline on this part of the process we ensure that people are clear on their roles and have the tools from myITProcess that they need to succeed. As with any skill set, this requires practice and scrutiny; hopefully these skills can also be a great reflection of Your Company Way.
