Organisational Design & Service Planning
As part of its global expansion program, a leading liberal arts university was building a state-of-the-art campus to accommodate more than 6,000 students. The university approached Synechron to assist with the construction, commissioning and transfer of its IT operations. The new campus consisted of more than 35 buildings that provided student accommodation and learning facilities, ranging from scientific labs to film studios.
The existing IT operations department was sized and organised to handle the temporary campus and to support 300 users. Planning the resourcing and organisation for the new campus, defining the service catalogue, and planning core processes represented a significant challenge
Synechron’s consultants were embedded into the University’s IT Operations to review existing services, support and resourcing profiles across all the university’s campuses. A detailed service catalogue was prepared, underpinned by a service-modelling tool that allowed the CIO and his Operations Director to perform complex scenario analysis. This included the ability to measure the impact of differentiated service levels, the impact of changes in unit volumes, and fluctuations in support issues in terms of both head count and cost.
The Synechron team then designed a structure for the new operations team to deliver efficiently and minimise redundant processes and bureaucracy. High-level governance guidelines were developed, each team within the new organisation was appropriately sized and high-level resource profiles were produced. This organisational structure, along with the resource profiles, were later used by the university to plan its hiring and resourcing strategy
- Better budget planning
The CIO and Operations director were being regularly challenged on their budget and head count plans. The service-planning tool allowed them to sit with stakeholders and demonstrate where changes could be made to service parameters in order to deliver savings. The ability to demonstrate the impact of reductions in headcount or operating expense on the quality and volume of services delivered was a powerful tool during the budget cycles. It also helped the CIO justify investment in automation and self-service programmes that had previously not been approved. - Cost transparency
The service catalogue provided for full cost transparency and integration with existing finance systems and self-service portals. It also incorporated pervasive and standardised university services that were not locally delivered. - Establishment of best practices
The organisational design incorporated the latest industry thinking in terms of governance, structure and workflow. The resource definitions and gap analysis played an important role in the University’s hiring plans as well as helping to identify opportunities for interim resourcing during the early stages of the new campus.
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