Growing a Culture of Service Management at NeSI
Georgina Rae1, Jun Huh1, Matt Chamberlain1, Thomas Berger1, Nick Jones1 1New Zealand Escience Infrastructure, Auckland New Zealand
Abstract
Background
Our researchers and research organisations now come from a more diverse range of domains, bringing with them different needs and service level expectations, making clear processes and performance standards a necessity. A full IT Service Management (ITSM) implementation is both beyond NeSI’s resources and likely beyond what is needed by the research sector. Colleagues from the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) faced similar challenges and adopted FitSM (a light weight Service Management framework) to build consistent service management standards across their EU partners. Taking inspiration from this approach, NeSI is now building our own culture of Service Management.
Actions
We are taking an Agile, incremental approach to this implementation, particularly given the significant ‘people’ aspect of the change for how we work at NeSI. Some steps in this include: base-lining maturity against desired state; allocating roles; deliberate change management; assessing whether tools are fit-for-purpose; and capturing and managing our processes.
Results
Benefits to date include having a framework around which to engage our institutional stakeholders; our team starting to understand the value of the change, collaboratively documenting and embedding what were once our more ‘heroic’ processes; and management of services being consolidated into one tool – Jira Service Management.
Conclusions
Change is hard at the best of times and implementing something that requires more process and rigour is never going to be an easy transition. However, by taking an agile perspective we are giving the team the time and customer-driven motivations to genuinely improve how we manage our services.
Biography
Georgina is the Science Engagement Manager at NeSI where she ensures that NeSI is building strong relationships with the research sector. Prior to NeSI she has worked in molecular biology and intellectual property. She is passionate about enabling research and is interested in the fundamental shifts required to level up scientific research.