Runbook Automation for Service Requests, Chapter 5: Connect with the Business About Cost of Delay
It’s 11am. You have important projects to complete, but you’ve already been interrupted by multiple requests — tickets, Slack messages, and even a phone call. It always seems like someone needs you to do something. To make matters worse, these service requests are largely the same repetitive tasks.
Now it’s 2pm. Just when you finally get back to your project work, you find yourself blocked and needing someone else to perform a task for you. Now you are the one opening up a service request and waiting for someone else to provision, configure, or investigate something for you.
Where did the day go?
The inefficiency of service requests —waiting, interruptions, slow turnaround times — has long been accepted as part of our default way of working. We have learned to accept the status quo as “the way it is” and not question the staggering costs.
How much of your operations team’s day-to-day time is lost to the interruptions, waiting, and inefficiency surrounding service requests?
The loss could be as much as 35-45% of a team’s total time. That’s what was discovered during a joint study of operations teams at 14 large enterprises by the consulting companies Liatrio and DTO Solutions in 2017.
A common trait shared by nearly all of the companies? They each dramatically underestimated the amount of time they were losing to the interruptions, waiting, and inefficiency of operations service requests.
Let’s get started calculating the full costs of service requests in your organization.
This guide covers:
- Methods for calculating the total cost of the waste around operations service requests
- The ROI of leveraging Runbook Automation to turn service requests into self-service
Chapter 5: Connect with the Business About Cost of Delay
Impressive labor savings are always welcome in a business conversation. However, in our experience, that conversation will quickly turn to “that’s great for your team, but what’s in it for mine?”
In other words, your business counterparts will want to know how a more efficient technology organization will improve their bottom line and help them hit their goals. Of course, you can point to quicker turnaround times for their requests. Everybody wants speedier turnaround times. However, you need to take it a step further and connect that to concrete business value. If you’re going to catch their attention, talk about “Cost of Delay.”
Cost of Delay quantifies the impact of time on the delivery of business value. In a nutshell, any delay in a business initiative has a measurable economic or reputational impact.
The Cost of Delay calculation could be as simple as “if we had capability x now, we would be making y additional money every month.”
Other Cost of Delay calculations can be more complicated, such as situations where the first one to market gets an outsized share of the revenue on an ongoing basis or where there is a date beyond which the revenue opportunity is lost.
The most common way to visualize Cost of Delay is to draw a graph where the x-axis is time, and the y-axis is revenue (or a non-monetary value). Everything under the curve is value the business could be capturing. If you start capturing value late, your business will draw a different curve. The difference between those curves is the Cost of Delay
Cost of Delay is a language commonly spoken between product teams and business leadership. For modern product teams, it’s a critical factor in how decisions about priorities are made.
If you want to convey the importance of replacing manual service requests with self-service, don’t just talk about the labor efficiency gains you’ll make within your technology org. Talk to your product and business colleagues about how your efficiency gains can help solve their Cost of Delay problems.
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