Client Success Story

Company: Dominion
Project: Benchmark Assessment
Date: November 2006
Industry: Utilities

The Client
Dominion is one of the nation's largest producers and transporters of energy, with a portfolio of approximately 26,500 megawatts of generation, 7,800 miles of natural gas transmission pipeline and 1 Tcfe of proved natural gas and oil reserves. Dominion also owns and operates the nation's largest underground natural gas storage system with about 960 billion cubic feet of storage capacity and serves retail energy customers in 11 states. Corporate headquarters are in Richmond, Va.

Dominion's strategy is to be a leading provider of electricity, natural gas and related services to customers in the energy-intensive Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the U.S., a potential market of 50 million homes and businesses where 40 percent of the nation’s energy is consumed.

The Dominion Service Desk Benchmark Assessment project was designed to assess the current Service Desk organization and processes, compare against Service Desk Industry Best Practices, and make recommendations designed to enhance the service desk support services at Dominion. The week-long review and assessment of Dominion service desk operations and processes included extensive interviews with service desk, technical support, end user and management personnel, observations of the service desk and review of available Incident Management System and ACD metrics.

Prior to formulating any ideas and recommendations about what Dominion may need to enhance or improve upon their existing Helpline organization, processes and services, BPA performed a level of due diligence. In performing the due diligence, BPA interviewed 25 Dominion employees, in several individual and group interview sessions; reviewed pre-engagement questionnaire responses from Helpline manager; observed Helpline in operation including use of tools and technologies; and reviewed available USPSD, ACD metrics, and available customer survey reports
Information obtained during this process was used to formulate an understanding of the current Dominion Helpline organization and the overall technical support environment. An understanding of the current environment led to the compilation of Major Findings that were then documented in the Findings and Recommendation deliverable.

• Contain costs while providing the same or higher level of service to customer
• Drive end-to-end service management
• Gain efficiencies through enhanced processes aligned with the business and best practices
• Resource limitations; fully leverage existing resources (human and technology)

Throughout the benchmark engagement, the cost of providing service was specifically identified as a major driving factor. It was an important, underlying concern. Beyond gaining an understanding of the driving factors and the current environment, BPA was then able to formulate some recommendations to enable Dominion to meet several, high-level expectations.

The Solution
The information gathered during the Benchmark Assessment identified eight primary recommendations to create value for the stakeholders:

• Organization Structure
• Service Management Processes
• Voice of the Customer
• Change Management
• Service Level Management
• Management Reporting
• Tools & Technology
• Helpline Training

The Results -

"In a truncated period of time BlueprintAudits.com was able to assess the environment and begin working toward recommendations. Julie had a defined project plan and did an excellent job at completion of the tasks. The deliverables that came out of the engagement were of great quality. As a result of the BlueprintAudits.com engagement, Dominion was able to develop multiple process improvement initiatives that have been of great benefit to the entire organization." - Larry Christian, Manager - IT Help Desk

Julie L. Mohr is the Principal Research Analyst and Author at BlueprintAudits.com. For over 15 years, she has been passionate about service and support management providing imaginative insight and dynamic leadership to transform service and support organizations into best practice, customer-focused environments. She has helped over 50 organizations including many Fortune 100 companies to implement Knowledge Management, ITSM, IT Governance, organization enhancements, process re-engineering and service level management. Julie is an active contributor to the future development of the industry through speaking engagements at conferences worldwide, researching industry trends and publishing over 150 articles on best practices. Julie has developed a support organization maturity model and audit methodology utilized by thousands of organizations to identify weaknesses and develop improvement plans. She is an expert worldwide instructor in multiple industry frameworks including ITSM, KCS and COBIT. Julie is a certified Helpdesk Director and certified ITIL® Service Manager. She is currently serving as VP of Membership for the itSMF LIG in Sacramento, a faculty member with HDI and participated on the HDI Support Center Certification (SCC) standards committee. Julie is the author of Mapping Support Processes: Blueprint for Success, The Help Desk Audit: Blueprint for Success, The Help Desk Toolkit: Companion CD and The Help Desk Dictionary, and maintains an informative industry portal for practitioners at www.blueprintaudits.com. She is a member of IEEE Computer Society, American Society for Quality, Association for Computing Machinery, ISACA, HDI, itSMF and the Association of Support Professionals. Julie is a graduate of The Ohio State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science.

BlueprintAudits.com was founded in 2003 by Julie L. Mohr. Founded originally as a publishing company, BlueprintAudits.com produced its first title in 2003, The Help Desk Audit: Blueprint for Success. Our mission was to create audits that would help service and support practitioners to understand the current level of maturity in a particular focus area and identify a strategy to improve. Each audit book also provides a blueprint for how to successfully improve any area identified as a weakness. Hence the name, BlueprintAudits.com. In 2004, BlueprintAudits.com released its second title, The Help Desk Audit Toolkit: Companion CD. This was the first CD-ROM and contained all of the templates from the book published the year earlier. In 2005, the third title was released, The Help Desk Dictionary.

Early in 2003, BlueprintAudits.com decided to invite industry experts to provide content to evolve the BlueprintAudits.com community into a mindshare of ideas for practitioners. In addition to the articles, BlueprintAudits.com expanded its offering to include research, links, presentations, and industry maturity reports. By the end of 2006, product sales and membership topped 2,000.
In 2007, BlueprintAudits.com expanded its offering to include:

• Assessments and Audits to help organizations compare themselves against the industry and their peers
• Training in ITSM, COBIT, Service Desk and Staff Development
• Database of assessment and audit data
• Membership portal
• eLearning Training Portal

Mapping Support Processes: Blueprint for Success
By Julie L. Mohr

$59.99 (US)

Scheduled to be Released: 2008
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Workshops

THE HELP DESK AUDIT: BLUEPRINT FOR SUCCESS
By Julie L. Mohr


$49.95 (US)

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THE HELP DESK AUDIT TOOLKIT: COMPANION CD
By Julie L. Mohr


$45.95 (US)

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