Dashboards, SLA’s & Task Forces’
Post Covid we find are working with distributed workforces, various time zones in hybrid meetings. Many people want to return back to the office, and regardless of the pros and cons. This new landscape can be navigated and we will show you how.
Dashboards -We are all familiar with glancing at the Scoreboard, while watching our favorite team. That simple behavior allows everyone to know how the team is doing. Dashboards provide a clear indicator how the company is doing, where it is succeeding and where it needs help, all without bias. Organization which use dashboards are more solutions oriented and agile.
Taskforce- Companies are removing vertical silos and developing an interdisciplinary team approach. A task force is a nimble way to execute on a new idea, to execute a change in strategy or vet a business venture.
Service Level Agreements- SLA’s are fundamental to working with both Staff, External Vendors and Clients. Gone are the days people are in the office at 5pm or on Fridays for that matter. Service Level Agreements have been used in IT for decades and provide clarity in what is expected and by when.
DeFonseka works with companies to bring these three tools into their corporate DNA, These approaches leverage technology and produce results quicker and more cost effectively.
Data Modeling and Financial Analysis
Business intelligence, or BI, plays a key role in the strategic planning of organizations and is used for multiple purposes, including measuring performance progress toward business goals, performing quantitative analysis, reporting and data sharing, and identifying customer insights.
Faster and more accurate reporting, analysis or planning; better business decisions; improved employee satisfaction and improved data quality top the list. Benefits achieved least frequently include reducing costs, increasing revenues and reducing IT headcount.
Power BI offers a set of mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 mobile devices. In the mobile apps, you connect to and interact with your cloud and on-premises data.
You create reports in Power BI Desktop. You create dashboards, and view dashboards and reports in the Power BI report service (https://powerbi.com). You view on-premises Power BI reports on Power BI Report Server. All these reports and dashboards are available in the Power BI mobile apps, whether they're on premises or in the cloud. Try viewing and interacting with them on your mobile device, be it iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, or Apple Watch), Android phone or tablet, or Windows 10 device.
Make informed decisions faster
Taskforce
We also encourage management to create a “Taskforce”. This team works on blue sky initiatives and re-imagines the business. These folks work on the business and provide key visibility on how to improve the overall operation. This is another reason successful companies were able to pivot in 2020. They had developed these change agents within the organization.
We also see Work From Anywhere being a way to retain employees, as their roles change. DeFonseka has a technology platform that routinely works with remote teams.
Service Level Agreements
A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract that establishes a set of deliverables that one party has agreed to provide another. This agreement can exist between a business and its customers, or one department that delivers a recurring service to another department within that business.
Ultimately, an service-level agreement is designed to create alignment between two parties by setting clear expectations and mitigating any issues before they happen. With that in mind, there are multiple types of SLA depending on your use case.
3 Types of SLA’s
Customer Service-Level Agreement
Internal Service-Level Agreement
Multilevel Service-Level Agreement
Customer Service-Level Agreement
A customer SLA is precisely what it sounds like: an agreement by a vendor to deliver a certain level of service to a particular customer. Here's a fun example:
In the TV show The Office, the company, Dunder Mifflin, supplies paper to various organizations. They might have a customer SLA stipulating that Dunder Mifflin will supply [Company X] with 50 reams of paper per month, shipped every Monday to [Address 1] and [Address 2] by Darryl Philbin -- with a confirmation of delivery sent to Jim Halpert. (Sorry, we had a little too much fun with the references in that one.)
Internal Service-Level Agreement
As explained earlier in this blog post, an internal SLA only concerns parties from within the company, rather than its customers. So, while a business might have an SLA open with each of its clients, it can also have a separate SLA between its sales and marketing departments.
For example, let's say Company X's sales department has to close $5,000 worth of sales per month in total, and each sale is worth $100. If the sales team's average win rate for the leads they engage with is 50%, Company X's marketing director, Josh, can work with the sales team on an SLA, stipulating that Marketing will deliver 100 qualified leads to sales director, Amy, by a certain date every month. This might include four weekly status reports per month, sent back to Josh by Amy, to ensure the leads Amy's team is receiving are helping them keep pace with their monthly sales goal.
Multilevel Service-Level Agreement
Multilevel SLAs can take several forms. This type of agreement can support a business's customers or the business's various internal departments. The point of this type of SLA is to outline what is expected of each party if there's more than just one service provider and one end user. Here's an example of a multi-level SLA in an internal situation:
It's a no-brainer for Company X's sales and marketing teams to partner up on an internal SLA that delivers leads from Marketing to Sales every month. But what if they wanted to incorporate a customer retention strategy into this contract, making it an SLA between Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service? After sales closes on 50 customers for the month, it's Customer Service's job to keep these customers happy and successful while using their product. In a multilevel SLA, Company X can have sales director, Amy, send monthly "customer friction" reports to Joan, the VP of service, based on dialogue the sales team has regularly with its clients. This helps the customer service team build a knowledge base that better prepares them for the pain points customers call them about.