The Friendly Audit Service

Helping you to strengthen your IT operational resilience capabilities and avoid IT meltdown

The need for strong operational capabilities

Running a good quality IT service for your organisation requires management capabilities that are fit for purpose. Processes, methods, techniques, procedures and best practices that ensure you implement IT change smoothly, deal with incidents calmly, detect and resolve underlying problems quickly, and manage complex infrastructure proactively so that it is secure, resilient and scalable.

If yours aren’t fit for purpose, IT meltdown may be just around the corner:

Ability to get to the root cause and fix issues results in gradual degradation of service quality
Quality and reliability issues creep in and the major disaster incident inevitably happens
Scalability limitations in your operational IT processes begin to choke resource efficiency when business growth edges you past the tipping point

You might already be living with ongoing meltdown symptoms

Your infrastructure team is totally maxed out and bottlenecking your business projects
Projects are falling behind plan and being delivered late
Implementations are all too often fraught with issues
Regular complaints about service stability from around your organisation

Are you confident that you:

have a good grasp of where all your issues are?
have found all the hidden risks?
know what is “fit for purpose” for your organisation?
can build a prioritised action plan?
have a plan that is realistic and achieveable?

If not, this is where our “friendly audit” offering will help you.

Our Friendly Audit Service

Think of it like the MOT that can prevent a car crash. We review your operational capabilities to make sure they are sufficiently roadworthy for your needs. We can do this at a summary level to identify those capabilities which warrant most attention, then assess selected disciplines in greater depth to arrive at an agreed action list.

Or, if you already have a specific area of concern, we can delve into the details of an individual capability and build an improvement plan.

1. Setting the "fit for purpose" target level

Every organisation is different – whether that be in terms of size and scale, dependence on technology, regulator oversight, or internal working culture. These all have a bearing on how much rigour and discipline must be applied to your IT management practices. But how do you set the right target level for your organisation?

Our TORC tool helps by classifying organisations in a way that helps to set those capability expectations.

3. Action Planning

We work with you to grade and prioritise the opportunity areas using a risk-based approach. Then we help you build the action plan. We don’t impose an action plan on you – it has to be your action plan, one that your team can commit to. We help you make sure it is as realistic and achievable as possible. This normally involves us advising you to be less optimistic with target dates – IT people are very good at over-committing and returning to ask for date extensions.

2. IT Capability Assessment

A collaborative, guided assessment to understand your own perceptions of your IT operational capabilities and to compare them in a gap analysis with where we believe you should be based on your TORC organisation profile.

Depending on the level you want to explore, we hold meetings and run workshops with nominated members of your IT team to identify the strengths and the opportunities for improvement in your IT management capabilities.

4. Implementation support

We can assist you in the implementation phase too, either by providing advice and consultancy, or by providing our virtual Project Management service to keep you on track.

We offer a pragmatic approach to building a realistic and achievable improvement plan to strengthen your IT management capabilities and make your IT service more resilient.