In 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic, Ben Reid had a problem. The IT service desk was meeting all its KPIs. Service desk analysts were
responding promptly. User satisfaction rates were within agreed targets. On the surface, everything seemed to be working fine. So why was Ben hearing that the nurses were dissatisfied with IT?
Ben asked his desktop team to spend one week away from their ticket queues from 3pm daily, and instead attend every ward in person. Every
nursing station across two hospitals was visited. While waiting for the nurses to talk to members of the desktop team, a startling discovery
was made under the desks at the nurses’ stations were piles of discarded IT devices, including tablets, keyboards and the occasional mouse. Each device was neatly labelled with the words:
‘Not working’
The desktop team had no idea there were this many malfunctioning devices at the nurses’ stations. As far as they knew, there wasn’t a single service desk ticket about faulty devices anywhere in their backlog. Was this what the nurses were complaining about? And if so, why didn’t they just log a ticket?
Ben took the time to observe the nurses at work. He discovered that nursing is a fast-paced and active job, and the nurses have little time to sit at a desk. After all, they are on shift in order to look after the health of patients, not to log IT issues.
Ben witnessed the way nurses spoke to and – most importantly – listened to their patients. For nurses, serving their patients is about empathising with a very human experience. He decided to follow their example and empathise with the people he himself was serving: the nurses on duty.
Through observation and discussion, Ben learned that whenever a device started malfunctioning, the nurses did whatever was necessary to keep meeting the needs of their patients: they found a working device and put the faulty one under the desk. They didn’t have the time or motivation to contact the service desk. Consequently, the desktop team had no idea that there was a growing backlog of broken devices.
Eventually, the number of working devices dwindled, and frustration grew. If you asked a nurse at either hospital what they thought of IT, the answers were consistently negative. He realised that conventional best practice in IT service management doesn’t consider the different circumstances and the different roles played by humans who use IT services.
Ben took his discoveries back to his team. They agreed that they needed to find a way to accommodate the speed and mobility of the nurses. Forcing them to adopt the existing service desk processes would hinder the entire mission of the hospitals, which was to provide ‘excellence in healthcare’ for patients and their families. It was equally clear that ‘more’ was not the answer: they had plenty of staff, plenty of funding, and plenty of equipment.
So the desktop team had to change the way they did even the most basic things. They started an experiment to see what would happen if they continued their daily visits to every ward in person for a month. On each visit, they checked in with the nurses on shift to see what IT problems they were having, and which devices needed attention. It turned out that the desktop team members were able to resolve many issues immediately, and for other issues, team members could log a ticket on behalf of the nurses.
Over the course of the month, the nurses came to love the visits by the desktop team, and their confidence in IT increased. The daily visits became a permanent KPI for the desktop team.
Ben and his team continue to try innovative and yet simple strategies that place the human experience at the centre of all that they do to support the mission of the two hospitals.
Key learnings from the case study:
- IT service management statistics do not reflect the human experience
- Two simple acts can tell you volumes about how your IT services are being used: observation and listening
- Ultimately, it all comes down to empathising with the people you’re serving.