Service Manager Profession: Origins, Harsh Reality, and the Path to Creating a Dream Team
A good service manager is the key to a good night's sleep for the customer (both external and internal). For me, this has been an axiom for 20 years. And although the position has long been established in the market, I still often come across the question “Why do we need service managers at all if the company's processes and employees are already working great?” In this article, I will not only answer this question, but also touch on history, share disappointments, and my vision of how to create and grow a cool team of service managers.
A bit of history. Where did service managers come from?
The most accurate answer to the question of why service managers are needed, in my opinion, is best found in the history of their emergence. In my practice, the term “service manager” (hereinafter SM) appeared about 20 years ago. At that time, I worked in a company engaged in the integration of Cisco IT solutions, and one of the leading managers approached me with a request from the customer to allocate a separate manager for a large service contract. This manager was supposed to become a single point of entry for the customer, understand its internal “kitchen”, coordinate engineers and control the vendor. And at the same time, form a non-standard set of reports on the service contract. Well, what could I answer him, except “any whim for your money”? 🙂 As it turned out later, they allocated an excellent service manager, the customer was satisfied. He figured out the intricacies of the customer's organizational structure, and in time “highlighted” the weak points in our internal processes, and took on some of the administrative tasks. And when it turned out that all production-related issues stopped affecting engineers, and they, the engineers, were able to concentrate more on technical tasks, then the quality of service increased, and people began to enjoy their work more. Having seen such a win-win, we began to scale this success story.
A few years later, I found myself in a large vendor company that has since left us, and found a similar role there with roughly the same functionality, but with a focus on knowing the vendor's internal “kitchen”. By the way, in large international companies, there are a lot of tricky nuances, without knowing which the time it takes to solve problems increases several times. And this is another plus in the list of answers to the question “why?”. At the same time, I learned that similar roles appeared in almost all large vendors, and then in integrators around the world.
Soft skills of SMs. What a manager should look at
Before going further, I would like to formulate expectations from CMs. I would like to point out right away that if we are talking about a team of CMs, it is desirable to select people with different psychological and technical profiles. For example, if the customer is demanding of details and expects mega-pedantry from the service company, then an easy-to-communicate but not scrupulous enough CM will not suit him. They will not work together. And someone, on the contrary, requires warmth and high-level thinking :). But there are skills, the possession of which significantly simplifies further work as a CM:
– Sociability and empathy. Basic soft skills for SM. It is explained simply: it is necessary to communicate with different people and find a common language with both managers, and engineers, and the back office, both on the side of the performer and the customer.
– Stress resistance. Another important factor. You need to understand that when everything is going well, the CM most likely works in the background, but then something bad happens (and most likely, according to the law of mischief, several problems at once) and you need to filter only the essence in parallel dialogues and push through the solution to the problems without unnecessary emotions. A good CM in such a situation will help the customer, create conditions for the engineer to work productively, and control the vendor. And if a non-standard solution is required, it will close its organization on itself. There is no need to panic at all here.
– Technical literacy and quick thinking (agility)The ability to immediately understand the essence of the problem and be able to speak the same language with both the customer and the engineer has more than once played a key role in building interaction within the framework of a service contract in my practice.
– Accuracy. This is already about routine activities, but it is here that a small mistake in one digit can lead to long proceedings and deterioration of relations with the customer or with the internal services of the contractor company. This skill is easily tested at the start using, for example, a proofreading test or similar tests.
This may not be the entire list. And what's more, I personally have a number of examples where people who don't have these skills to the fullest extent became excellent SMs. So here we can talk about what makes sense to pay attention to, but the final decision lies in the area of responsibility of the manager who accepts people into a specific team for specific tasks in a specific environment.
Search or download? How to create a good SM-s team
It would seem that everything is great – we hire suitable candidates and “we have a golden key in our pocket”. But, as usual, any cool idea can be buried by routine. I learned about this as an unpleasant surprise (the same disappointment promised at the beginning of the article) when I was looking for specialists on the market. In most companies, the role of the CM has been reduced to administrative work, cost control, thoughtless drawing of reports and endless control of quality indicators. Some do not communicate with customers at all, some do not delve into technology even at a basic level, etc. As a result, additional roles appear – assistant CMs, senior CMs, technical account lawyers and a lot of other names for different facets of the same entity and, as a result, key competencies are blurred. And try to offer the role of CM to someone who was called more significantly in the previous place, while performing much fewer functions than is required of him in the new place. And this is not counting the fact that the SM is expected to be well versed in the processes of his company and an outsider will not be of much help here.
So it turns out that it is easier and, by the way, cheaper to grow SMs from scratch than to look for them on the side. First, an internship with a mentor, then an ITSM course to immerse yourself in the logic of what is happening in the service (starting with a course before gaining practical experience is utopia), an ITIL Foundation certificate (the version does not change the essence) and then “on the beaten path”. A great option if the core of the team is already in place. But if you need to build a team “from scratch”, then you will have to look on the market. And here I would suggest focusing on SMs from small integrators, there, whether you like it or not, you have to deal with the whole range of tasks – from communicating with the customer to coordinating engineers.
One way or another, if we have come to a model where it would seem that we can stop looking for people on the side and pump up our interns, it is important not to forget that if we move only within the framework of a well-established and well-established model, there is a risk of losing understanding of what is happening around us and falling behind the market. And along the way, we will have to solve problems related to forecasting the load – a steadily growing market niche is needed for regular expansion. At the same time, pumping up specialists cannot be stopped – we will get a gap between experts and juniors and teaching will become much more difficult. Therefore, ideally, periodically introduce fresh blood or socialize with SMs from other companies. It is clear that here you need to be ready to work with the risk of hunting. By the way, the departure of a strong SM to a competitor company almost always carries a high probability of the departure of customers, whose one-stop shop this SM was. And this is another reason why pumping up your own, initially loyal interns is preferable to hiring from outside. But on the other hand, finding a balance in such an area is an interesting management task in itself. There is no magic pill in this matter, as in most topics related to the formation of professional teams.
How to evaluate
Now, perhaps, about the most subtle topic. How to measure the success of the SM? It is not always a clear KPI. Personally, I am more about cultivating an approach to work, rather than tracking indicators. But still, the manager needs some kind of tool to understand who is good and whose approach needs to be adjusted. For me, the key criterion for the good work of the SM is the customer's willingness to regularly buy this service as a separate line in the CP. Of course, subject to compliance with financial indicators and maintaining a positive atmosphere in the team. But, of course, the assessment of the quality of the SM's work can be divided into components. For example:
Control of planned cost price.This is a classic. In practice, everything depends on the degree of influence of the SM on internal processes (you can also look at marginality or profitability).
Upsell volumes in current contracts. If the customer trusts us, he will definitely extend the contract.
Regular positive feedback.Both from the customer's side towards the integrator company, and from the engineers or production (all those who provide service),
Certification (ITSM etc.)
Participation in process automation. A sign of an active role and readiness is not just to respond to changes in customer requirements and expectations, but also to optimize processes and scale up the experience gained.
But here, each manager is naturally free to choose his own set of indicators. The main thing is not to slide into endless KPI control and not to lose the balance (and this is the key word) between the paradigms of “service is provided by people for people” and “business for business”.
Where to grow
So, we hired a young talent, pumped him up, gave him his own contracts to manage. What next? How to answer his question, “I already know everything here, where should I grow next?” Moreover, if at the early stage of pumping the chain “junior-middle-lead” (by the way, ITSM certification is already localized enough to link experience and certificates to the transition to the next level) is perceived quite adequately, then what to do with the long-term prospect? Who can a pumped-up SM become in the future?
I will skip the obvious option about growth in the direction of people management: everything is more or less clear here – it sounds nice, but in fact it is applicable to units. Largely, due to the fact that in the market, if there is a demand for managers, then it concerns managers focused, first of all, on making money for the company, and a good CM is more about people and customer focus. So there remains a relatively small niche for growth through managing a team of CMs or related roles within the service.
More realistic options include project management. The skills are similar, but there is one, in my opinion, that is a real stop factor. Project management is essentially a task that has an end goal and requires the project manager to be able to stop in time. Service contract management (with a high-quality approach to providing services, such contracts are usually extended) is about smooth movement, following the rules and with the goal of lasting. In my observations, switching from one type of thinking to another is very difficult.
Therefore, from my point of view, it makes sense to form a path through project management only for service managers who think in terms of setting final goals and their subsequent implementation within the set deadlines and with minimal costs.
Another way is in the BDM service. Here, the knowledge of the field is excellent, and there is demand in the market, and any cool CM already has the negotiating skills in the base. The only “but” is the ability to sell. In the role of CM, this superpower is not particularly pumped up, but if a person has talent from the beginning, then one can grow in this role. I cannot help but make a reservation that in my practice there are very few successful examples, although there are examples of transition to account managers and further growth in the sales line.
Another option is product owners. The role in our market is relatively young and requires the ability to work at the junction of the customer and production with empathy and organization in the clip. Here there are significantly more successful examples.
Typical problems of SMs and how they are treated
As in any profession, the role of a CM has specific problems that both the CMs themselves and those who interact with them regularly constantly face. Here I am not talking about how much a weak CM or one who constantly “turns on the boss” can poison the atmosphere in the team. In my opinion, this is best treated surgically. But in other cases, there are two groups of problems – “skill” and “routine”.
Skills are usually associated with:
– the difficulty of switching from the manner of communication with the customer (sometimes downright tough and always hierarchically clear on the part of the customer, of course) to intra-team communication (in strong companies this is, as a rule, light rhetoric with a share of humor on the verge of sarcasm),
– constant focus on how to make the customer happy, while staying within the financial plans and at the same time not allowing the team to burn out,
– the need to at least superficially understand the technology.
I would classify the following as “routine”:
– control of applications and availability of engineers,
– endless adaptation to customer processes,
– meetings. Endless meetings, including “about nothing”.
– reports. Sometimes the simple curiosity of the customer leads to the workload of not only the SM, but also the entire team of administrators and engineers.
The good news is that both types of the described problems can be treated. The first part is by pumping up soft and hard skills, and the second is by automation. And if there are a lot of courses on skills and what to do with them is more or less clear, then I would dwell on automation in a little more detail.
Getting away from routine. Automation of SM work.
From my experience, a team of at least 3 CMs needs at least one full-time developer. The main thing is to start automation with simple things in which everyone, both CMs and developers, will see real benefit, and then it will roll by itself.
What do you want from automation first of all? To throw off the routine from the SM and simplify the collection of analytical information so that you can please customers in reports not with dry numbers, but with advanced recommendations. You can do everything manually up to a certain point, but for example, in my practice there was a complex and invented report in which the customer wanted to see finances distributed by regions depending on the number and complexity of requests. Who and when was this frightening? Manually, it takes several hours to collect. But when coordinating the report, the customer at each stage asked to change certain data on specific requests and each time the report had to be re-collected. As a result, several hours turned into days of stress. We automated it – and the process was reduced to reasonable numbers.
However, in most cases, it is not possible to implement analytics automation as quickly as we would like. It is clear that there are a number of ITSM-friendly software that reflect all the main processes. But the nuance is that despite the external similarity of the processes on the market, it is extremely rare to find a service department that will be enough to deploy a solution out of the box. Whether we want it or not, but for customization, a team of in-house developers and analysts is always needed. Sometimes this role can be combined with the current functionality of some employee, but this is only in small companies. And more. We deployed such a system, adapted it to our business processes, adjusted the processes (sometimes this is necessary), trained or retrained the staff, entered data (each step can take months), learned to work with the system not once a month, but on an ongoing basis, provide service and then it turns out that whoever you ask from the ordinary performers, everyone is still dissatisfied with something. And, for example, it would be better to keep silent about generating reports from the system in a format suitable for sending to customers with their endless specifics. A lot of add-ons appear. And even if we can allocate a separate team of developers for them, the only environment from which we can get an analyst, and most likely a tester, is, again, SMs. And it turns out that a great SM, in addition to his usual skills, should be able to formulate tasks for developers and understand the architecture of ITSM systems. And here a treacherous idea often arises to involve a couple of interns in the task, arm them with instructions, and everyone will be happy. It won’t. Even if they cope, it will definitely not add significance for the customer, who will think “if you can do it, then any other integrator can do it too.” But if you showed the customer a team of strong SMs with advanced capabilities for automating even just reports, then it will be difficult to compete with you, and the customer will not want to go anywhere.
So why do we need social media? Afterword
To sum it up, it can be said that due to the wide variety of technologies and business processes – both in customers and integrators – in the modern world, it is almost impossible to do without a team of CMs when providing service. At the same time, naturally, one should not expect even the most high-class CM to replace the entire team of engineers and administrators or well-built processes. And if you are planning to launch such a role as CM, then you need to work out processes for it and sharpen automation. And if you had to advise someone to build a team from scratch, then I would suggest first forming a team of CMs (you shouldn't spare money here – you need a strong backbone), including juniors, middles, and seniors, and expand this team by interns and, possibly, individual experts focused on specific customers (banks, government agencies and telecom have completely different approaches to work and expectations from service companies, for example). It remains to understand well yourself and cultivate in the team an understanding of how to pump up SMs from scratch, what tasks to give interns for a smooth immersion into the world of service maintenance, how to control without cutting off initiative, how to motivate and where to grow. Actually, as in most roles, not only in IT.
